# Towards Color-Faithful Low-Light Image Enhancement via Adaptive Color Debiasing and Saturation Rectification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10512 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10512/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (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)
- [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)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00860/) (2021)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Normalizing Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05923/) (2021)
- [Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11548/) (2022)
- [Learning Image-adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for High Performance Photo Enhancement in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14468/) (2020)
- [LEDNet: Joint Low-light Enhancement and Deblurring in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03373/) (2022)
- [You Only Need 90K Parameters to Adapt Light: A Light Weight Transformer for Image Enhancement and Exposure Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14871/) (2022)
- [LightenDiffusion: Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement with Latent-Retinex Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08939/) (2024)
- [AdaInt: Learning Adaptive Intervals for 3D Lookup Tables on Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13983/) (2022)
- [Low-light Image Enhancement via Breaking Down the Darkness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15557/) (2021)
- [FourLLIE: Boosting Low-Light Image Enhancement by Fourier Frequency Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03033/) (2023)
- [SepLUT: Separable Image-adaptive Lookup Tables for Real-time Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08351/) (2022)
- [DarkIR: Robust Low-Light Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13443/) (2024)
- [GLARE: Low Light Image Enhancement via Generative Latent Feature based Codebook Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12431/) (2024)
- [Better Than Reference In Low Light Image Enhancement: Conditional Re-Enhancement Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11434/) (2020)
- [URWKV: Unified RWKV Model with Multi-state Perspective for Low-light Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23068/) (2025)
- [Time-Aware Auto White Balance in Mobile Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05623/) (2025)
- [Color-wise Attention Network for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08681/) (2019)
- [NamedCurves: Learned Image Enhancement via Color Naming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09892/) (2024)
- [Lightweight and Fast Real-time Image Enhancement via Decomposition of the Spatial-aware Lookup Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16121/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Low-light imaging often introduces color bias caused by the low signal-to-noise ratio and the image formation process. Although recent low-light image enhancement methods have achieved strong brightness recovery, faithful color restoration remains challenging, manifesting as overall color bias together with local under- and over-saturation. To address this issue, we propose CAGE, a cylindrical color correction framework with adaptive color debiasing and gamut-harmonized saturation rectification for color-faithful low-light image enhancement. We first introduce AdaLAB, a cylindrical adaptive LAB color space that provides a decoupled and image-specific basis for uniform color correction. Building on this color space, we further develop AdaCCT, an adaptive cylindrical color transform with forward and inverse transforms for the conversion between RGB and AdaLAB color space, as well as necessary color debiasing and saturation rectification. The forward transform suppresses embedded color bias before backbone enhancement by reorganizing the chromatic distribution through chromatic-plane shifting and scaling, while the inverse transform achieves faithful saturation rectification through out-of-gamut lightness compensation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CAGE achieves more faithful color restoration, specifically reduces color bias and saturation abnormality, and delivers better overall visual quality across different low-light enhancement backbones. The code is available at https://yangzhichen763.github.io/CAGE/.