# Low-Light Enhancement via Encoder-Decoder Network with Illumination Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13360 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13360/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [Kindling the Darkness: A Practical Low-light Image Enhancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04161/) (2019)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11699/) (2023)
- [Zero-Reference Low-Light Enhancement via Physical Quadruple Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12933/) (2024)
- [A Novel Encoder-Decoder Network with Guided Transmission Map for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04757/) (2022)
- [Distilled Pooling Transformer Encoder for Efficient Realistic Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14220/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework for low-light image enhancement, named the Encoder-Decoder Network with Illumination Guidance (EDNIG). Building upon the U-Net architecture, EDNIG integrates an illumination map, derived from Bright Channel Prior (BCP), as a guidance input. This illumination guidance helps the network focus on underexposed regions, effectively steering the enhancement process. To further improve the model's representational power, a Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) module is incorporated to extract multi-scale contextual features, enabling better handling of diverse lighting conditions. Additionally, the Swish activation function is employed to ensure smoother gradient propagation during training. EDNIG is optimized within a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework using a composite loss function that combines adversarial loss, pixel-wise mean squared error (MSE), and perceptual loss. Experimental results show that EDNIG achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in quantitative metrics and visual quality, while maintaining lower model complexity, demonstrating its suitability for real-world applications. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/tranleanh/ednig.