Learning a Simple Low-Light Image Enhancer From Paired Low-Light Instances

Low-light Image Enhancement (LIE) aims at improving contrast and restoring details for images captured in low-light conditions. Most of the previous LIE algorithms adjust illumination using a single input image with several handcrafted priors. Those solutions, however, often fail in revealing image details due to the limited information in a single image and the poor adaptability of handcrafted priors. To this end, we propose PairLIE, an unsupervised approach that learns adaptive priors from low-light image pairs. First, the network is expected to generate the same clean images as the two inputs share the same image content. To achieve this, we impose the network with the Retinex theory and make the two reflectance components consistent. Second, to assist the Retinex decomposition, we propose to remove inappropriate features in the raw image with a simple self-supervised mechanism. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that the proposed PairLIE achieves comparable performance against the state-of-the-art approaches with a simpler network and fewer handcrafted priors. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhenqifu/PairLIE.