Learning Sample Relationship for Exposure Correction

Jie Huang, Feng Zhao, Man Zhou, Jie Xiao, Naishan Zheng, Kaiwen Zheng, Zhiwei Xiong; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 9904-9913

Exposure correction task aims to correct the underexposure and its adverse overexposure images to the normal exposure in a single network. As well recognized, the optimization flow is opposite. Despite the great advancement, existing exposure correction methods are usually trained with a mini-batch of both underexposure and overexposure mixed samples and have not explored the relationship between them to solve the optimization inconsistency. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to conjunct their optimization processes by correlating and constraining the relationship of correction procedure in a mini-batch. The core designs of our framework consist of two steps: 1) formulating the exposure relationship of samples across the batch dimension via a context-irrelevant pretext task. 2) delivering the above sample relationship design as the regularization term within the loss function to promote optimization consistency. The proposed sample relationship design as a general term can be easily integrated into existing exposure correction methods without any computational burden in inference time. Extensive experiments over multiple representative exposure correction benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains by introducing our sample relationship design.