Recently, enhancing image quality in the original RAW domain has garnered significant attention, with denoising and reconstruction emerging as fundamental tasks. Although some works attempt to couple these tasks, they primarily focus on cascade learning while neglecting task associativity within a broader parameter space, leading to suboptimal performance. This work introduces a novel approach by rethinking denoising and reconstruction from a "backbone-head" perspective, leveraging the stronger shared parameter space offered by the backbone, compared to the encoder used in existing works. We derive task-specific heads with fewer parameters to mitigate learning pressure. By incorporating chromaticity-and-noise perception module into the backbone and introducing task-specific supervision during training, we enable simultaneous high-quality results for reconstruction and denoising. Additionally, we design a dual-head interaction module to capture the latent correspondence between the two tasks, significantly enhancing multi-task accuracy. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/csmty/CANS.

Diffusion-based super-resolution methods have achieved impressive results under normal lighting conditions. However, their performance in low-light scenarios faces fundamental limitations due to two inherent challenges. First, the characteristic noise patterns and complex degradation features in severely underexposed images create significant obstacles for diffusion models to establish reliable noise prediction mechanisms. Second, these methods often fail to establish effective coupling between the degradation priors of low-light observations and the reconstruction process, resulting in compromised detail recovery and unrealistic texture synthesis.To address these limitations, we propose Degradation-aware Adaptation with Representation Embedding (DARE) method, a novel one-step diffusion framework specifically designed for super-resolution in dark environments. DARE employs a degradation-aware low-rank adaptation strategy that dynamically adjusts model parameters conditioned on degradation-specific features, effectively addressing compound degradations such as low-light, blur, and noise. Furthermore, we introduce a content-sensitive representation embedding mechanism, integrating complementary spatial and frequency domain priors through a bilinear cross-attention module. This module explicitly captures second-order statistical correlations, enriching semantic understanding and detail recovery during the denoising process. Extensive experiments across diverse low-light scenarios demonstrate that DARE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and perceptual accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/csmty/DARE.

Image enhancement is a classical and enduring challenge in computer vision, seeking to produce high-quality images from corrupted observations. Unlike existing methods that target specific tasks, this work focuses on endowing the model with generic inductive capabilities, enabling fast adaptation to previously unseen enhancement tasks. Specifically, we investigate the inter-task weaving from both structural and parametric perspectives. Structurally, we establish inter-task weaving under a Hadamard view by designing a unified architecture called Degradation Unraveling Network (DUNet) tailored for diverse enhancement tasks, which incorporates a progressive degradation unraveling mechanism for fine-grained enhancement. Parametrically, we reveal the task-agnostic nature of degradation estimation parameters and treat them as meta-representations. A Bilevel Purify Modeling (BPM) framework is then proposed to reinforce their latent unified representation, where only the degradation-related parameters are optimized as meta-representations. Based on this design, a task-aware adaptation solution is further introduced, only the remaining parameters are allowed to be fine-tuned efficiently and enabling fast task adaptation. Extensive performance evaluations on three representative image enhancement tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. The adaptability of our method is further verified by a series of algorithm analyses.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown significant success in the low-light image enhancement task. However, most of existing works encounter challenges in balancing quality and efficiency simultaneously. This limitation hinders practical applicability in real-world scenarios and downstream vision tasks. To overcome these obstacles, we propose a Self-Calibrated Illumination (SCI) learning scheme, introducing a new perspective to boost the model's capability. Based on a weight-sharing illumination estimation process, we construct an embedded self-calibrator to accelerate stage-level convergence, yielding gains that utilize only a single basic block for inference, which drastically diminishes computation cost. Additionally, by introducing the additivity condition on the basic block, we acquire a reinforced version dubbed SCI++, which disentangles the relationship between the self-calibrator and illumination estimator, providing a more interpretable and effective learning paradigm with faster convergence and better stability. We assess the proposed enhancers on standard benchmarks and in-the-wild datasets, confirming that they can restore clean images from diverse scenes with higher quality and efficiency. The verification on different levels of low-light vision tasks shows our applicability against other methods.

Object detection in low-light scenarios has attracted much attention in the past few years. A mainstream and representative scheme introduces enhancers as the pre-processing for regular detectors. However, because of the disparity in task objectives between the enhancer and detector, this paradigm cannot shine at its best ability. In this work, we try to arouse the potential of enhancer + detector. Different from existing works, we extend the illumination-based enhancers (our newly designed or existing) as a scene decomposition module, whose removed illumination is exploited as the auxiliary in the detector for extracting detection-friendly features. A semantic aggregation module is further established for integrating multi-scale scene-related semantic information in the context space. Actually, our built scheme successfully transforms the "trash" (i.e., the ignored illumination in the detector) into the "treasure" for the detector. Plenty of experiments are conducted to reveal our superiority against other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be public if it is accepted.

Images captured from low-light scenes often suffer from severe degradations, including low visibility, color casts, intensive noises, etc. These factors not only degrade image qualities, but also affect the performance of downstream Low-Light Vision (LLV) applications. A variety of deep networks have been proposed to enhance the visual quality of low-light images. However, they mostly rely on significant architecture engineering and often suffer from the high computational burden. More importantly, it still lacks an efficient paradigm to uniformly handle various tasks in the LLV scenarios. To partially address the above issues, we establish Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Architecture Search (RUAS), a general learning framework, that can address low-light enhancement task, and has the flexibility to handle other challenging downstream vision tasks. Specifically, we first establish a nested optimization formulation, together with an unrolling strategy, to explore underlying principles of a series of LLV tasks. Furthermore, we design a differentiable strategy to cooperatively search specific scene and task architectures for RUAS. Last but not least, we demonstrate how to apply RUAS for both low- and high-level LLV applications (e.g., enhancement, detection and segmentation). Extensive experiments verify the flexibility, effectiveness, and efficiency of RUAS.

Existing low-light image enhancement techniques are mostly not only difficult to deal with both visual quality and computational efficiency but also commonly invalid in unknown complex scenarios. In this paper, we develop a new Self-Calibrated Illumination (SCI) learning framework for fast, flexible, and robust brightening images in real-world low-light scenarios. To be specific, we establish a cascaded illumination learning process with weight sharing to handle this task. Considering the computational burden of the cascaded pattern, we construct the self-calibrated module which realizes the convergence between results of each stage, producing the gains that only use the single basic block for inference (yet has not been exploited in previous works), which drastically diminishes computation cost. We then define the unsupervised training loss to elevate the model capability that can adapt general scenes. Further, we make comprehensive explorations to excavate SCI's inherent properties (lacking in existing works) including operation-insensitive adaptability (acquiring stable performance under the settings of different simple operations) and model-irrelevant generality (can be applied to illumination-based existing works to improve performance). Finally, plenty of experiments and ablation studies fully indicate our superiority in both quality and efficiency. Applications on low-light face detection and nighttime semantic segmentation fully reveal the latent practical values for SCI. The source code is available at https://github.com/vis-opt-group/SCI.

Visual perception in low-light conditions (e.g., nighttime) plays an important role in various multimedia-related applications (e.g., autonomous driving). The enhancement (provides a visual-friendly appearance) and detection (detects the instances of objects) in low-light are two fundamental and crucial visual perception tasks. In this paper, we make efforts on how to simultaneously realize low-light enhancement and detection from two aspects. First, we define a parallel architecture to satisfy the task demand for both two tasks. In which, a decomposition-type warm-start acting on the entrance of parallel architecture is developed to narrow down the adverse effects brought by low-light scenes to some extent. Second, a novel illumination allocator is designed by encoding the key illumination component (the inherent difference between normal-light and low-light) to extract hierarchical features for assisting in enhancement and detection. Further, we make a substantive discussion for our proposed method. That is, we solve enhancement in a coarse-to-fine manner and handle detection in a decomposed-to-integrated fashion. Finally, multidimensional analytical and evaluated experiments are performed to indicate our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at \urlhttps://github.com/tengyu1998/PIA