Learning to See Low-Light Images via Feature Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Raw low-light image enhancement (LLIE) has achieved much better performance than the sRGB domain enhancement methods due to the merits of raw data. However, the ambiguity between noisy to clean and raw to sRGB mappings may mislead the single-stage enhancement networks. The two-stage networks avoid ambiguity by step-by-step or decoupling the two mappings but usually have large computing complexity. To solve this problem, we propose a single-stage network empowered by Feature Domain Adaptation (FDA) to decouple the denoising and color mapping tasks in raw LLIE. The denoising encoder is supervised by the clean raw image, and then the denoised features are adapted for the color mapping task by an FDA module. We propose a Lineformer to serve as the FDA, which can well explore the global and local correlations with fewer line buffers (friendly to the line-based imaging process). During inference, the raw supervision branch is removed. In this way, our network combines the advantage of a two-stage enhancement process with the efficiency of single-stage inference. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer computing costs (60% FLOPs of the two-stage method DNF). Our codes will be released after the acceptance of this work.