Low-light video enhancement is a critical task in computer vision with a wide range of applications. However, there is a lack of high-quality benchmark datasets in this field. To address this issue, we collect a high-quality low-light video dataset using a well-designed camera system. The videos in our dataset feature apparent camera motion and strict spatial alignment. In order to achieve general low-light video enhancement, we propose a Retinex-based method called Light Adjustable Network (LAN). LAN iteratively adjusts the brightness and adapts to different lighting conditions in various real-world scenarios, producing visually appealing results. We further develop a new dataset capture method and low-light video enhancement method to address the limitation of our previous dataset in capturing dynamic scenes and previous method. The new camera setup and capture method enable the recording of real continuous videos and generate the new dataset. Our new low-light video enhancement method, LAN++, leverages a new inter-frame relationship, difference images. It utilizes the texture information contained in the difference images of dynamic scenes to supplement the high-frequency details of the original features, which produce sharper and more realistic output images. The extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our low-light video dataset and enhancement method. Our dataset can be downloaded at https://pan.baidu.com/s/1d3EljvVduVM0wUOvzjWaqA?pwd=p45g.

Images captured in low-light conditions often suffer from significant quality degradation. Recent works have built a large variety of deep Retinex-based networks to enhance low-light images. The Retinex-based methods require decomposing the image into reflectance and illumination components, which is a highly ill-posed problem and there is no available ground truth. Previous works addressed this problem by imposing some additional priors or regularizers. However, finding an effective prior or regularizer that can be applied in various scenes is challenging, and the performance of the model suffers from too many additional constraints. We propose a contrastive learning method and a self-knowledge distillation method for Retinex decomposition that allow training our Retinex-based model without elaborate hand-crafted regularization functions. Rather than estimating reflectance and illuminance images and representing the final images as their element-wise products as in previous works, our regularizer-free Retinex decomposition and synthesis network (RFR) extracts reflectance and illuminance features and synthesizes them end-to-end. In addition, we propose a loss function for contrastive learning and a progressive learning strategy for self-knowledge distillation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods can achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Low-light video enhancement is a challenging task with broad applications. However, current research in this area is limited by the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets. To address this issue, we design a camera system and collect a high-quality low-light video dataset with multiple exposures and cameras. Our dataset provides dynamic video pairs with pronounced camera motion and strict spatial alignment. To achieve general low-light video enhancement, we also propose a novel Retinex-based method named Light Adjustable Network (LAN). LAN iteratively refines the illumination and adaptively adjusts it under varying lighting conditions, leading to visually appealing results even in diverse real-world scenarios. The extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our low-light video dataset and enhancement method. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/ciki000/DID.