Papers › Learning to See in the Dark

Learning to See in the Dark

4 May 2018CVPR 2018 6arXiv:1805.01934archive 2025-07-28

Chen Chen, Qifeng Chen, Jia Xu, Vladlen Koltun

Imaging in low light is challenging due to low photon count and low SNR. Short-exposure images suffer from noise, while long exposure can induce blur and is often impractical. A variety of denoising, deblurring, and enhancement techniques have been proposed, but their effectiveness is limited in extreme conditions, such as video-rate imaging at night. To support the development of learning-based pipelines for low-light image processing, we introduce a dataset of raw short-exposure low-light images, with corresponding long-exposure reference images. Using the presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fully-convolutional network. The network operates directly on raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on such data. We report promising results on the new dataset, analyze factors that affect performance, and highlight opportunities for future work. The results are shown in the supplementary video at https://youtu.be/qWKUFK7MWvg

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Code

Syntology Ran 1 of 14 code samples harvested from 5 repositories linked to this paper; 13 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong.

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19 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

compscikaran/nightlight-web mentioned on GitHubtf report
danilka-na/DegreeWork mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement mentioned on GitHubtfApache-2.0 report
sdoria/SID mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Code Syntology ran Syntology

14 samples harvested; 1 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 13 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · our draft was wrong
13unverified

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read_in_pickle eoinoreilly30/seeing-in-the-dark/adamw_fujifilm.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 430f2f205dce4756 · report
create_files kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cf3152406f05fa10 · report
crop_images eoinoreilly30/seeing-in-the-dark/adamw_fujifilm.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 6fe3c6e45de063e5 · report
demosaicing kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/Traditional.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · de6a4c519048370e · report
denoising_sharpening kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/Traditional.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 8a3d4f41e8538215 · report
function_to_depth_to_space kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 37a55ee112ef2110 · report
function_to_remove_negs kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 853442f9f5fee7a7 · report
get_confirm_token cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the-Dark/download_models.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 135b3dc835ffe6ad · report
get_file_content_as_string ashikshafi08/learning_to_see_in_the_dark_Fastai/libs/functionality.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 6800b859a41149ac · report
lrelu cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the-Dark/train_Fuji.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · f406422099514e4c · report
pixel_shuffle cydonia999/Learning_to_See_in_the_Dark_PyTorch/models/lsid.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 83d71e95179cbcfc · report
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upsample_and_concat cchen156/Learning-to-See-in-the-Dark/train_Fuji.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 99be22ebba093e63 · report
white_balance kauziishere/lowLightImageEnhancement/Traditional.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 610d5091b3bf0f9f · report

Tasks

DeblurringDenoisingImage Denoising

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

SID

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Denoising ELD SonyA7S2 x100 Paired Data(SID) PSNR (Raw) 44.47 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising ELD SonyA7S2 x100 Paired Data(SID) SSIM (Raw) 0.968 #7 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising ELD SonyA7S2 x200 Paired Data(SID) PSNR (Raw) 41.97 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising ELD SonyA7S2 x200 Paired Data(SID) SSIM (Raw) 0.928 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID SonyA7S2 x250 Paired Data (SID) PSNR (Raw) 39.60 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID SonyA7S2 x250 Paired Data (SID) SSIM (Raw) 0.938 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID x100 SID (paired real data) PSNR (Raw) 42.06 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID x100 SID (paired real data) SSIM 0.955 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID x300 Paired Data(SID) PSNR (Raw) 36.85 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Image Denoising SID x300 Paired Data(SID) SSIM 0.923 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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