Illuminating Darkness: Enhancing Real-world Low-light Scenes with Smartphone Images

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06898v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 04:01:56 GMT
• Title: Illuminating Darkness: Enhancing Real-world Low-light Scenes with Smartphone Images
• Authors: S M A Sharif, Abdur Rehman, Zain Ul Abidin, Rizwan Ali Naqvi, Fayaz Ali Dharejo, Radu Timofte,
• Abstract summary: This dataset comprises 6,425 unique focus-aligned image pairs captured with smartphone sensors in dynamic settings under challenging lighting conditions (0.1--200 lux)<n>We extracted and refined around 180,000 non-overlapping patches from 6,025 collected scenes for training while reserving 400 pairs for benchmarking.<n>In addition to that, we collected 2,117 low-light scenes from different sources for extensive real-world aesthetic evaluation.
• Score: 47.39277249268179
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Digital cameras often struggle to produce plausible images in low-light conditions. Improving these single-shot images remains challenging due to a lack of diverse real-world pair data samples. To address this limitation, we propose a large-scale high-resolution (i.e., beyond 4k) pair Single-Shot Low-Light Enhancement (SLLIE) dataset. Our dataset comprises 6,425 unique focus-aligned image pairs captured with smartphone sensors in dynamic settings under challenging lighting conditions (0.1--200 lux), covering various indoor and outdoor scenes with varying noise and intensity. We extracted and refined around 180,000 non-overlapping patches from 6,025 collected scenes for training while reserving 400 pairs for benchmarking. In addition to that, we collected 2,117 low-light scenes from different sources for extensive real-world aesthetic evaluation. To our knowledge, this is the largest real-world dataset available for SLLIE research. We also propose learning luminance-chrominance (LC) attributes separately through a tuning fork-shaped transformer model to enhance real-world low-light images, addressing challenges like denoising and over-enhancement in complex scenes. We also propose an LC cross-attention block for feature fusion, an LC refinement block for enhanced reconstruction, and LC-guided supervision to ensure perceptually coherent enhancements. We demonstrated our method's effectiveness across various hardware and scenarios, proving its practicality in real-world applications. Code and dataset available at https://github.com/sharif-apu/LSD-TFFormer.

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