# Deep Light Pollution Removal in Night Cityscape Photographs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09145 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09145/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement via Structure Modeling and Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05839/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10564/) (2022)
- [How to Train Neural Networks for Flare Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12485/) (2020)
- [DarkIR: Robust Low-Light Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13443/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Visibility in Nighttime Haze Images Using Guided APSF and Gradient Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01738/) (2023)
- [GLARE: Low Light Image Enhancement via Generative Latent Feature based Codebook Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12431/) (2024)
- [Flare7K++: Mixing Synthetic and Real Datasets for Nighttime Flare Removal and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04236/) (2023)
- [Nighttime Smartphone Reflective Flare Removal Using Optical Center Symmetry Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15046/) (2023)
- [NightHaze: Nighttime Image Dehazing via Self-Prior Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07408/) (2024)
- [A Semi-supervised Nighttime Dehazing Baseline with Spatial-Frequency Aware and Realistic Brightness Constraint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18548/) (2024)
- [Automatic Flare Spot Artifact Detection and Removal in Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04384/) (2021)
- [Attention-guided Image Compression by Deep Reconstruction of Compressive Sensed Saliency Skeleton](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15368/) (2021)
- [Multi-modality Deep Restoration of Extremely Compressed Face Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05548/) (2021)
- [Sky Optimization: Semantically aware image processing of skies in low-light photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10172/) (2020)
- [Learned HDR Image Compression for Perceptually Optimal Storage and Display](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13179/) (2024)
- [Light Pollution Reduction in Nighttime Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10046/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nighttime photography is severely degraded by light pollution induced by pervasive artificial lighting in urban environments. After long-range scattering and spatial diffusion, unwanted artificial light overwhelms natural night luminance, generates skyglow that washes out the view of stars and celestial objects and produces halos and glow artifacts around light sources. Unlike nighttime dehazing, which aims to improve detail legibility through thick air, the objective of light pollution removal is to restore the pristine night appearance by neutralizing the radiative footprint of ground lighting. In this paper we introduce a physically-based degradation model that adds to the previous ones for nighttime dehazing two critical aspects; (i) anisotropic spread of directional light sources, and (ii) skyglow caused by invisible surface lights behind skylines. In addition, we construct a training strategy that leverages large generative model and synthetic-real coupling to compensate for the scarcity of paired real data and enhance generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation and learning framework substantially reduce light pollution artifacts and better recover authentic night imagery than prior nighttime restoration methods.