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Advancing Low-Light Raw Enhancement by Retasking Diffusion Models for Camera ISP (arxiv.org)
2 points by MaysonL 288 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A pre-trained image generator that builds pictures from noise is reused as the camera's cleanup step to brighten very dark raw photos. It beat the best earlier tools on how natural and detailed the results look across three low-light benchmarks.

Abstract · DarkDiff: Advancing Low-Light Raw Enhancement by Retasking Diffusion Models for Camera ISP

High-quality photography in extreme low-light conditions is challenging but impactful for digital cameras. With advanced computing hardware, traditional camera image signal processor (ISP) algorithms are gradually being replaced by efficient deep networks that enhance noisy raw images more intelligently. However, existing regression-based models often minimize pixel errors and result in oversmoothing of low-light photos or deep shadows. Recent work has attempted to address this limitation by training a diffusion model from scratch, yet those models still struggle to recover sharp image details and accurate colors. We introduce a novel framework to enhance low-light raw images by retasking pre-trained generative diffusion models with the camera ISP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in perceptual quality across three challenging low-light raw image benchmarks.

Amber Yijia Zheng, Yu Zhang, Jun Hu, Raymond A. Yeh, Chen Chen
arXiv:2505.23743 · cs.CV, eess.IV · submitted May 29, 2025
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