CoLIE

[Paper] [Colab demo] [BibTeX]

Fast Context-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement via Neural Implicit Representations

Tomáš Chobola*  Yu Liu  Hanyi Zhang  Julia A. Schnabel  Tingying Peng* 
Technical University of Munich Helmholtz AI King’s College London

* Corresponding author

Accepted to ECCV 2024.

🔥 Frame-by-frame enhancement of a low-light clip from Game of Thrones.

Overview

• Challenges with Current Methods: Existing deep learning methods for low-light image enhancement struggle with high-resolution images, and they often fail to meet practical visual perception needs in diverse, unseen scenarios.
• Introduction of CoLIE: CoLIE (Context-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement) is a novel approach for enhancing low-light images. It works by mapping 2D coordinates of underexposed images to their illumination components, conditioned on local context.
• Methodology: The method utilizes HSV color space for image reconstruction. It employs an implicit neural function along with an embedded guided filter to further reduce computational overhead.
• Innovations in Training: CoLIE introduces a single image-based training loss function. This function aims to improve the model's adaptability across various scenes, enhancing its practical applicability.

Neural Implicit Representation for Low-Light Enhancement

Our proposed framework begins with the extraction of the Value component from the HSV image representation. Subsequently, we employ a neural implicit representation (NIR) model to infer the illumination component which is an essential part for effective enhancement of the input low-light image. This refined Value component is then reintegrated with the original Hue and Saturation components, forming a comprehensive representation of the enhanced image. The architecture of CoLIE involves dividing the inputs into two distinct parts: the elements of the Value component and the coordinates of the image. Each of these components is subject for regularization with unique parameters within their respective branches. By adopting this structured approach, our framework ensures precise control over the enhancement process.

Code

Requirements

• python3.10
• pytorch==2.3.1

Running the code

python colie.py

The code execution is controlled with the following parameters:

• --input_folder defines the name of the folder with input images
• --output_folder defines the name of the folder where the output images will be saved
• --down_size is the size to which the input image will be downsampled before processing
• --epochs defines the number of optimisation steps
• --window defines the size of the context window
• --L is the "optimally-intense threshold", lower values produce brighter images

The strength of the regularisation terms in the loss functon is defined by the following parameters:

• --alpha: fidelity control (default setting: 1)
• --beta: illumination smoothness (default setting: 20)
• --gamma: exposure control (default setting: 8)
• --delta: sparsity level (default setting: 5)

Please refer to the example in notebook.ipynb (or in Colab here) for example code execution and visualisation.

Results

Comparison with the state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised low-light image enhancement (RUAS, SCI).

Fluorescence microscopy intensity correction.

Results on the DarkFace dataset.

Citing CoLIE

Please consider citing our paper if our code are useful:

@inproceedings{chobola2024fast,
      title={Fast Context-Based Low-Light Image Enhancement via Neural Implicit Representations}, 
      author={Tomáš Chobola and Yu Liu and Hanyi Zhang and Julia A. Schnabel and Tingying Peng},
      booktitle={Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
      year={2024}
}