{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/semantically-contrastive-learning-for-low","title":"Semantically Contrastive Learning for Low-light Image Enhancement","arxiv_id":"2112.06451","date":"2021-12-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dong Liang","Ling Li","Mingqiang Wei","Shuo Yang","Liyan Zhang","Wenhan Yang","Yun Du","Huiyu Zhou"],"abstract":"Low-light image enhancement (LLE) remains challenging due to the unfavorable prevailing low-contrast and weak-visibility problems of single RGB images. In this paper, we respond to the intriguing learning-related question -- if leveraging both accessible unpaired over/underexposed images and high-level semantic guidance, can improve the performance of cutting-edge LLE models? Here, we propose an effective semantically contrastive learning paradigm for LLE (namely SCL-LLE). Beyond the existing LLE wisdom, it casts the image enhancement task as multi-task joint learning, where LLE is converted into three constraints of contrastive learning, semantic brightness consistency, and feature preservation for simultaneously ensuring the exposure, texture, and color consistency. SCL-LLE allows the LLE model to learn from unpaired positives (normal-light)/negatives (over/underexposed), and enables it to interact with the scene semantics to regularize the image enhancement network, yet the interaction of high-level semantic knowledge and the low-level signal prior is seldom investigated in previous methods. Training on readily available open data, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses the state-of-the-arts LLE models over six independent cross-scenes datasets. Moreover, SCL-LLE's potential to benefit the downstream semantic segmentation under extremely dark conditions is discussed. Source Code: https://github.com/LingLIx/SCL-LLE.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06451v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.06451v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"semantically-contrastive-learning-for-low","repo_url":"https://github.com/linglix/scl-lle","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-enhancement","task_name":"Image Enhancement"},{"task_slug":"low-light-image-enhancement","task_name":"Low-Light Image Enhancement"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.06451","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}