Zero-Reference Low-Light Enhancement via Physical Quadruple Priors

Wenjing Wang, Huan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Jiaying Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 26057-26066

Understanding illumination and reducing the need for supervision pose a significant challenge in low-light enhancement. Current approaches are highly sensitive to data usage during training and illumination-specific hyper-parameters limiting their ability to handle unseen scenarios. In this paper we propose a new zero-reference low-light enhancement framework trainable solely with normal light images. To accomplish this we devise an illumination-invariant prior inspired by the theory of physical light transfer. This prior serves as the bridge between normal and low-light images. Then we develop a prior-to-image framework trained without low-light data. During testing this framework is able to restore our illumination-invariant prior back to images automatically achieving low-light enhancement. Within this framework we leverage a pretrained generative diffusion model for model ability introduce a bypass decoder to handle detail distortion as well as offer a lightweight version for practicality. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework's superiority in various scenarios as well as good interpretability robustness and efficiency. Code is available on our project homepage: http://daooshee.github.io/QuadPrior-Website/