# DL-KDD: Dual-Light Knowledge Distillation for Action Recognition in the Dark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02468 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02468/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [Can Spatiotemporal 3D CNNs Retrace the History of 2D CNNs and ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09577/) (2017)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [Large-scale weakly-supervised pre-training for video action recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00561/) (2019)
- [Cross-modal knowledge distillation for action recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04641/) (2019)
- [ARID: A New Dataset for Recognizing Action in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03876/) (2020)
- [Semantics-aware Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Sensor-to-Vision Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00210/) (2020)
- [Multi-view knowledge distillation transformer for human action recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14358/) (2023)
- [Unlimited Knowledge Distillation for Action Recognition in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09327/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [OwlSight: A Robust Illumination Adaptation Framework for Dark Video Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23266/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human action recognition in dark videos is a challenging task for computer vision. Recent research focuses on applying dark enhancement methods to improve the visibility of the video. However, such video processing results in the loss of critical information in the original (un-enhanced) video. Conversely, traditional two-stream methods are capable of learning information from both original and processed videos, but it can lead to a significant increase in the computational cost during the inference phase in the task of video classification. To address these challenges, we propose a novel teacher-student video classification framework, named Dual-Light KnowleDge Distillation for Action Recognition in the Dark (DL-KDD). This framework enables the model to learn from both original and enhanced video without introducing additional computational cost during inference. Specifically, DL-KDD utilizes the strategy of knowledge distillation during training. The teacher model is trained with enhanced video, and the student model is trained with both the original video and the soft target generated by the teacher model. This teacher-student framework allows the student model to predict action using only the original input video during inference. In our experiments, the proposed DL-KDD framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the ARID, ARID V1.5, and Dark-48 datasets. We achieve the best performance on each dataset and up to a 4.18% improvement on Dark-48, using only original video inputs, thus avoiding the use of two-stream framework or enhancement modules for inference. We further validate the effectiveness of the distillation strategy in ablative experiments. The results highlight the advantages of our knowledge distillation framework in dark human action recognition.