Priori Knowledge Makes Low-Light Image Enhancement More Reasonable

This paper presents a priori knowledge-based low-light image enhancement framework, termed Priori DCE (Priori Deep Curve Estimation). The priori knowledge consists of two key aspects: (1) enhancing a low-light image is an ill-posed task, as the brightness of the enhanced image corresponding to a low-light image is uncertain. To resolve this issue, we incorporate priori channels into the model to guide the brightness of the enhanced image; (2) during the enhancement of a low-light image, the brightness of pixels may increase or decrease. This paper explores the probability of a pixel’s brightness increasing/decreasing as its prior enhancement/suppression probability. Intuitively, pixels with higher brightness should have a higher priori suppression probability, while pixels with lower brightness should have a higher priori enhancement probability. Inspired by this, we propose an enhancement function that adaptively adjusts the priori enhancement probability based on variations in pixel brightness. In addition, we propose the Global-Attention Block (GA Block). The GA Block ensures that, during the low-light image enhancement process, each pixel in the enhanced image is computed based on all the pixels in the low-light image. This approach facilitates interactions between all pixels in the enhanced image, thereby achieving visual balance. The experimental results on the LOLv2-Synthetic dataset demonstrate that Priori DCE has a significant advantage. Specifically, compared to the SOTA Retinexformer, the Priori DCE improves the PSNR index and SSIM index from 25.67 and 92.82 to 29.49 and 93.6, respectively, while the NIQE index decreases from 3.94 to 3.91.