High-Quality Exposure Correction with Diffusion-Based Image Generation Priors

Although most existing exposure correction methods achieve high fidelity, they often place excessive focus on overall pixel-wise accuracy, making it challenging to effectively model extreme exposure regions, which results in suboptimal perceptual quality. Recently, diffusion models have received significant attention due to their remarkable performance in the realm of image generation. However, their successful application to exposure correction remains a challenging and open question. The key challenge lies in generating accurate image structures and maintaining high image fidelity during stochastic diffusion processes. In this paper, we propose DPEC (Diffusion Prior-based Exposure Correction), a novel framework for image exposure correction that utilizes diffusion-based image generation priors encapsulated in pre-trained large-scale diffusion models. Specifically, we first propose an efficient fine-tuning strategy to derive an exposure corrector from pre-trained models, enabling the generation of enhanced images in a single-step denoising process. Moreover, we seamlessly combine the strengths of diffusion models and regression models, and design a joint cross-attention module to integrate multi-scale diffusion prior features, thereby effectively preserving high-frequency details and minimizing random artifacts. The diffusion model focuses on dealing with low-frequency content rather than all the intricate texture details. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DPEC method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on multiple exposure correction datasets, whether in terms of fidelity, perceptual quality, or visual effects.