# Multiple Latent Space Mapping for Compressed Dark Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07622 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07622/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [WIDER FACE: A Face Detection Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06523/) (2015)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05923/) (2021)
- [Compression Artifacts Reduction by a Deep Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06993/) (2015)
- [R2RNet: Low-light Image Enhancement via Real-low to Real-normal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14501/) (2021)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [PyramidBox: A Context-assisted Single Shot Face Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07737/) (2018)
- [Deep Denoising of Flash and No-Flash Pairs for Photography in Low-Light Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05116/) (2020)
- [Learning a Single Model with a Wide Range of Quality Factors for JPEG Image Artifacts Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06912/) (2020)
- [Classify and Generate: Using Classification Latent Space Representations for Image Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07543/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dark image enhancement aims at converting dark images to normal-light images. Existing dark image enhancement methods take uncompressed dark images as inputs and achieve great performance. However, in practice, dark images are often compressed before storage or transmission over the Internet. Current methods get poor performance when processing compressed dark images. Artifacts hidden in the dark regions are amplified by current methods, which results in uncomfortable visual effects for observers. Based on this observation, this study aims at enhancing compressed dark images while avoiding compression artifacts amplification. Since texture details intertwine with compression artifacts in compressed dark images, detail enhancement and blocking artifacts suppression contradict each other in image space. Therefore, we handle the task in latent space. To this end, we propose a novel latent mapping network based on variational auto-encoder (VAE). Firstly, different from previous VAE-based methods with single-resolution features only, we exploit multiple latent spaces with multi-resolution features, to reduce the detail blur and improve image fidelity. Specifically, we train two multi-level VAEs to project compressed dark images and normal-light images into their latent spaces respectively. Secondly, we leverage a latent mapping network to transform features from compressed dark space to normal-light space. Specifically, since the degradation models of darkness and compression are different from each other, the latent mapping process is divided mapping into enlightening branch and deblocking branch. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in compressed dark image enhancement.