DRLIE: Flexible Low-Light Image Enhancement via Disentangled Representations

Abstract

Low-light image enhancement (LIME) aims to convert images with unsatisfied lighting into desired ones. Different from existing methods that manipulate illumination in uncontrollable manners, we propose a flexible framework to take user-specified guide images as references to improve the practicability. To achieve the goal, this article models an image as the combination of two components, that is, content and exposure attribute, from an information decoupling perspective. Specifically, we first adopt a content encoder and an attribute encoder to disentangle the two components. Then, we combine the scene content information of the low-light image with the exposure attribute of the guide image to reconstruct the enhanced image through a generator. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art alternatives. Particularly, the proposed method allows users to enhance images according to their preferences, by providing specific guide images. Our source code and the pretrained model are available at https://github.com/Linfeng-Tang/DRLIE.