# Discovering an Image-Adaptive Coordinate System for Photography Processing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (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)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Deep Bilateral Learning for Real-Time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02880/) (2017)
- [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)
- [DeepLPF: Deep Local Parametric Filters for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13985/) (2020)
- [Implicit Neural Representation for Cooperative Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11722/) (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)
- [AdaInt: Learning Adaptive Intervals for 3D Lookup Tables on Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13983/) (2022)
- [Real-time Image Enhancer via Learnable Spatial-aware 3D Lookup Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08697/) (2021)
- [Mobile Computational Photography: A Tour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09000/) (2021)
- [Deep White-Balance Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01354/) (2020)
- [Aleth-NeRF: Illumination Adaptive NeRF with Concealing Field Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09093/) (2023)
- [4D LUT: Learnable Context-Aware 4D Lookup Table for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01749/) (2022)
- [StarEnhancer: Learning Real-Time and Style-Aware Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12898/) (2021)
- [NILUT: Conditional Neural Implicit 3D Lookup Tables for Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11920/) (2023)
- [MEFLUT: Unsupervised 1D Lookup Tables for Multi-exposure Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11847/) (2023)
- [PSENet: Progressive Self-Enhancement Network for Unsupervised Extreme-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00712/) (2022)
- [Unpaired Learning for High Dynamic Range Image Tone Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00219/) (2021)
- [4K-Resolution Photo Exposure Correction at 125 FPS with ~8K Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08759/) (2023)
- [DiffLLE: Diffusion-guided Domain Calibration for Unsupervised Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09279/) (2023)
- [Fearless Luminance Adaptation: A Macro-Micro-Hierarchical Transformer for Exposure Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00872/) (2023)
- [Modeling the Lighting in Scenes as Style for Auto White-Balance Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09090/) (2022)
- [Deterministic Neural Illumination Mapping for Efficient Auto-White Balance Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03939/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Luminance-GS: Adapting 3D Gaussian Splatting to Challenging Lighting Conditions with View-Adaptive Curve Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01503/) (2025)
- [Unifying Color and Lightness Correction with View-Adaptive Curve Adjustment for Robust 3D Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18322/) (2026)
- [CURVE: CLIP-Utilized Reinforcement Learning for Visual Image Enhancement via Simple Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23102/) (2025)
- [P2GS: Physical Prior-guided Gaussian Splatting for Photometrically Consistent Urban Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16925/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Curve & Lookup Table (LUT) based methods directly map a pixel to the target output, making them highly efficient tools for real-time photography processing. However, due to extreme memory complexity to learn full RGB space mapping, existing methods either sample a discretized 3D lattice to build a 3D LUT or decompose into three separate curves (1D LUTs) on the RGB channels. Here, we propose a novel algorithm, IAC, to learn an image-adaptive Cartesian coordinate system in the RGB color space before performing curve operations. This end-to-end trainable approach enables us to efficiently adjust images with a jointly learned image-adaptive coordinate system and curves. Experimental results demonstrate that this simple strategy achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in various photography processing tasks, including photo retouching, exposure correction, and white-balance editing, while also maintaining a lightweight design and fast inference speed.