# ERetinex: Event Camera Meets Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

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

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [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)
- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11950/) (2023)
- [Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11548/) (2022)
- [Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13164/) (2023)
- [Learning Semantic-Aware Knowledge Guidance for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07039/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Orthogonal High-rank Augmentation for RGB-Event Transformer-trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04129/) (2023)
- [Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11014/) (2022)
- [Learning Spatial-Temporal Implicit Neural Representations for Event-Guided Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13767/) (2023)
- [Joint Enhancement and Denoising Method via Sequential Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08468/) (2018)
- [Learning Optical Flow from Event Camera with Rendered Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11011/) (2023)

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

- [RetinexDual: Retinex-based Dual Nature Approach for Generalized Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04797/) (2025)
- [RetinexDualV2: Physically-Grounded Dual Retinex for Generalized UHD Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27979/) (2026)
- [NEC-Diff: Noise-Robust Event-RAW Complementary Diffusion for Seeing Motion in Extreme Darkness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20005/) (2026)
- [EvLIR: Learning Illumination Residuals from Ordered Events for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29430/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light image enhancement aims to restore the under-exposure image captured in dark scenarios. Under such scenarios, traditional frame-based cameras may fail to capture the structure and color information due to the exposure time limitation. Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that respond to pixel-wise brightness changes asynchronously. Event cameras' high dynamic range is pivotal for visual perception in extreme low-light scenarios, surpassing traditional cameras and enabling applications in challenging dark environments. In this paper, inspired by the success of the retinex theory for traditional frame-based low-light image restoration, we introduce the first methods that combine the retinex theory with event cameras and propose a novel retinex-based low-light image restoration framework named ERetinex. Among our contributions, the first is developing a new approach that leverages the high temporal resolution data from event cameras with traditional image information to estimate scene illumination accurately. This method outperforms traditional image-only techniques, especially in low-light environments, by providing more precise lighting information. Additionally, we propose an effective fusion strategy that combines the high dynamic range data from event cameras with the color information of traditional images to enhance image quality. Through this fusion, we can generate clearer and more detail-rich images, maintaining the integrity of visual information even under extreme lighting conditions. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a gain of 1.0613 dB in PSNR while reducing FLOPS by 84.28%.