# EvLIR: Learning Illumination Residuals from Ordered Events for Low-Light Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29430 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29430/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11548/) (2022)
- [Bringing a Blurry Frame Alive at High Frame-Rate with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10180/) (2018)
- [Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13164/) (2023)
- [Event-based Stereo Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15548/) (2020)
- [Event Enhanced High-Quality Image Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08336/) (2020)
- [Learning Semantic-Aware Knowledge Guidance for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07039/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00834/) (2024)
- [STAR: A Structure and Texture Aware Retinex Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06690/) (2019)
- [Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11014/) (2022)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement using Event-Based Illumination Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09379/) (2025)
- [Towards End-to-End Neuromorphic Event-based 3D Object Reconstruction Without Physical Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00741/) (2025)
- [SEE: See Everything Every Time -- Adaptive Brightness Adjustment for Broad Light Range Images via Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.21120/) (2025)
- [ERetinex: Event Camera Meets Retinex Theory for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02484/) (2025)
- [Ultralight Polarity-Split Neuromorphic SNN for Event-Stream Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03244/) (2025)
- [EvRWKV: A Continuous Interactive RWKV Framework for Effective Event-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03184/) (2025)
- [DRWKV: Focusing on Object Edges for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18594/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Spatiotemporal Properties for Efficient Event-Driven Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06306/) (2025)
- [Event-Illumination Collaborative Low-light Image Enhancement with a High-resolution Real-world Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22186/) (2026)
- [BiEvLight: Bi-level Learning of Task-Aware Event Refinement for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04975/) (2026)
- [FracEvent: Event-Camera Simulation via Fractional-Relaxation Pixel Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26636/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light image enhancement is severely ill-posed when the input frame contains missing structure, saturated noise, and weak local contrast. Event cameras provide asynchronous brightness-change observations with high temporal resolution, but prior works often treat voxel channels as an unordered or static feature stack before fusion, rather than explicitly modeling their within-window temporal evolution, weakening the temporal evidence that makes events useful. We propose EvLIR, a temporal-residual enhancement framework that learns illumination residuals from ordered events for low-light image enhancement. Given a low-light frame and its aligned event voxel, EvLIR preserves the ordered temporal bins of the event stream and introduces a Temporal Event Residual Module (TERM) to encode short-window event dynamics with a lightweight ConvGRU. The resulting temporal state is converted into a bounded illumination correction, which provides spatially adaptive photometric guidance for Retinex-style illumination estimation and subsequent reliability-aware image-event restoration. On SDE and SDSD indoor/outdoor benchmarks, EvLIR achieves the best result on eleven of twelve dataset-metric pairs, with average scores of 25.63~dB PSNR, 28.30~dB PSNR*, and 0.827 SSIM across the four benchmarks.