# Dimma: Semi-supervised Low Light Image Enhancement with Adaptive Dimming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09633/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (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)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05923/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10729/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00306/) (2023)
- [Pyramid Diffusion Models For Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10028/) (2023)
- [AdaPool: Exponential Adaptive Pooling for Information-Retaining Downsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00772/) (2021)
- [Lighting up NeRF via Unsupervised Decomposition and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10664/) (2023)
- [LIME: A Method for Low-light IMage Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05034/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement via Histogram Equalization Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01766/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enhancing low-light images while maintaining natural colors is a challenging problem due to camera processing variations and limited access to photos with ground-truth lighting conditions. The latter is a crucial factor for supervised methods that achieve good results on paired datasets but do not handle out-of-domain data well. On the other hand, unsupervised methods, while able to generalize, often yield lower-quality enhancements. To fill this gap, we propose Dimma, a semi-supervised approach that aligns with any camera by utilizing a small set of image pairs to replicate scenes captured under extreme lighting conditions taken by that specific camera. We achieve that by introducing a convolutional mixture density network that generates distorted colors of the scene based on the illumination differences. Additionally, our approach enables accurate grading of the dimming factor, which provides a wide range of control and flexibility in adjusting the brightness levels during the low-light image enhancement process. To further improve the quality of our results, we introduce an architecture based on a conditional UNet. The lightness value provided by the user serves as the conditional input to generate images with the desired lightness. Our approach using only few image pairs achieves competitive results compared to fully supervised methods. Moreover, when trained on the full dataset, our model surpasses state-of-the-art methods in some metrics and closely approaches them in others.