# DarkVision: A Benchmark for Low-light Image/Video Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06269/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03995/) (2015)
- [Deep Feature Flow for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07715/) (2016)
- [Flow-Guided Feature Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10025/) (2017)
- [Burst Denoising with Kernel Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02327/) (2017)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [FastDVDnet: Towards Real-Time Deep Video Denoising Without Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01361/) (2019)
- [Memory Enhanced Global-Local Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12063/) (2020)
- [Dark Model Adaptation: Semantic Image Segmentation from Daytime to Nighttime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02575/) (2018)
- [DeepISP: Towards Learning an End-to-End Image Processing Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06724/) (2018)
- [Sequence Level Semantics Aggregation for Video Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06390/) (2019)
- [UG2+ Track 2: A Collective Benchmark Effort for Evaluating and Advancing Image Understanding in Poor Visibility Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04474/) (2019)
- [Attention Guided Low-light Image Enhancement with a Large Scale Low-light Simulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00682/) (2019)
- [Deep Burst Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05790/) (2017)
- [Basis Prediction Networks for Effective Burst Denoising with Large Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04421/) (2019)
- [Temporal RoI Align for Video Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03495/) (2021)
- [MSR-net:Low-light Image Enhancement Using Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02488/) (2017)
- [Object Detection from Video Tubelets with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04053/) (2016)
- [Connecting Image Denoising and High-Level Vision Tasks via Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01826/) (2018)
- [RENOIR - A Dataset for Real Low-Light Image Noise Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.8230/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03594/) (2023)
- [Learning Physics-Informed Noise Models from Dark Frames for Low-Light Raw Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09126/) (2023)
- [Towards RAW Object Detection in Diverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15678/) (2024)
- [Real-World Atmospheric Turbulence Correction via Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07371/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Content and Context Cues for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07693/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Imaging and perception in photon-limited scenarios is necessary for various applications, e.g., night surveillance or photography, high-speed photography, and autonomous driving. In these cases, cameras suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio, which degrades the image quality severely and poses challenges for downstream high-level vision tasks like object detection and recognition. Data-driven methods have achieved enormous success in both image restoration and high-level vision tasks. However, the lack of high-quality benchmark dataset with task-specific accurate annotations for photon-limited images/videos delays the research progress heavily. In this paper, we contribute the first multi-illuminance, multi-camera, and low-light dataset, named DarkVision, serving for both image enhancement and object detection. We provide bright and dark pairs with pixel-wise registration, in which the bright counterpart provides reliable reference for restoration and annotation. The dataset consists of bright-dark pairs of 900 static scenes with objects from 15 categories, and 32 dynamic scenes with 4-category objects. For each scene, images/videos were captured at 5 illuminance levels using three cameras of different grades, and average photons can be reliably estimated from the calibration data for quantitative studies. The static-scene images and dynamic videos respectively contain around 7,344 and 320,667 instances in total. With DarkVision, we established baselines for image/video enhancement and object detection by representative algorithms. To demonstrate an exemplary application of DarkVision, we propose two simple yet effective approaches for improving performance in video enhancement and object detection respectively. We believe DarkVision would advance the state-of-the-arts in both imaging and related computer vision tasks in low-light environment.