Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach

Guoqiang Liang, Kanghao Chen, Hangyu Li, Yunfan Lu, Lin Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 23-33

Event camera has recently received much attention for low-light image enhancement (LIE) thanks to their distinct advantages such as high dynamic range. However current research is prohibitively restricted by the lack of large-scale real-world and spatial-temporally aligned event-image datasets. To this end we propose a real-world (indoor and outdoor) dataset comprising over 30K pairs of images and events under both low and normal illumination conditions. To achieve this we utilize a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory to curate the dataset with spatial alignment precision under 0.03mm. We then introduce a matching alignment strategy rendering 90% of our dataset with errors less than 0.01s. Based on the dataset we propose a novel event-guided LIE approach called EvLight towards robust performance in real-world low-light scenes. Specifically we first design the multi-scale holistic fusion branch to extract holistic structural and textural information from both events and images. To ensure robustness against variations in the regional illumination and noise we then introduce a Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection to selectively fuse features of images from regions with high SNR and enhance those with low SNR by extracting regional structural information from events. our EvLight significantly surpasses the frame-based methods e.g. Retinexformer by 1.14 dB and 2.62 dB respectively. Code and datasets are available at https://vlislab22.github.io/eg-lowlight/.