# Low-Light Enhancement Effect on Classification and Detection: An Empirical Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14461 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14461/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement via Structure Modeling and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05839/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Unfolding Total Variation Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00984/) (2021)
- [Joint Enhancement and Denoising Method via Sequential Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08468/) (2018)
- [CodeEnhance: A Codebook-Driven Approach for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05253/) (2024)

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

- [FRBNet: Revisiting Low-Light Vision through Frequency-Domain Radial Basis Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23444/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light images are commonly encountered in real-world scenarios, and numerous low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods have been proposed to improve the visibility of these images. The primary goal of LLIE is to generate clearer images that are more visually pleasing to humans. However, the impact of LLIE methods in high-level vision tasks, such as image classification and object detection, which rely on high-quality image datasets, is not well explored. To explore the impact, we comprehensively evaluate LLIE methods on these high-level vision tasks by utilizing an empirical investigation comprising image classification and object detection experiments. The evaluation reveals a dichotomy: textitWhile Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods enhance human visual interpretation, their effect on computer vision tasks is inconsistent and can sometimes be harmful.  Our findings suggest a disconnect between image enhancement for human visual perception and for machine analysis, indicating a need for LLIE methods tailored to support high-level vision tasks effectively. This insight is crucial for the development of LLIE techniques that align with the needs of both human and machine vision.