# Unified-EGformer: Exposure Guided Lightweight Transformer for Mixed-Exposure Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13170/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19756/) (2024)
- [MobileViT: Light-weight, General-purpose, and Mobile-friendly Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02178/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00860/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05923/) (2021)
- [Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11548/) (2022)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices with Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02470/) (2017)
- [Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11084/) (2021)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Wavelet-based Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00306/) (2023)
- [Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13164/) (2023)
- [DeepLPF: Deep Local Parametric Filters for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13985/) (2020)
- [Iterative Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Backlit Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17569/) (2023)
- [Global Structure-Aware Diffusion Process for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17577/) (2023)
- [You Only Need 90K Parameters to Adapt Light: A Light Weight Transformer for Image Enhancement and Exposure Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14871/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Darkness to Detail: Frequency-Aware SSMs for Low-Light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09650/) (2024)
- [LENVIZ: A High-Resolution Low-Exposure Night Vision Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19804/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Multi-Perspective Taxonomy and Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05976/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent strides made by AI in image processing, the issue of mixed exposure, pivotal in many real-world scenarios like surveillance and photography, remains inadequately addressed. Traditional image enhancement techniques and current transformer models are limited with primary focus on either overexposure or underexposure. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified-Exposure Guided Transformer (Unified-EGformer). Our proposed solution is built upon advanced transformer architectures, equipped with local pixel-level refinement and global refinement blocks for color correction and image-wide adjustments. We employ a guided attention mechanism to precisely identify exposure-compromised regions, ensuring its adaptability across various real-world conditions. U-EGformer, with a lightweight design featuring a memory footprint (peak memory) of only ~1134 MB (0.1 Million parameters) and an inference time of 95 ms (9.61x faster than the average), is a viable choice for real-time applications such as surveillance and autonomous navigation. Additionally, our model is highly generalizable, requiring minimal fine-tuning to handle multiple tasks and datasets with a single architecture.