Enhance Image as You Like with Unpaired Learning

Enhance Image as You Like with Unpaired Learning

Xiaopeng Sun, Muxingzi Li, Tianyu He, Lubin Fan

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1011-1017. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/140

Low-light image enhancement exhibits an ill-posed nature, as a given image may have many enhanced versions, yet recent studies focus on building a deterministic mapping from input to an enhanced version. In contrast, we propose a lightweight one-path conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) to learn a one-to-many relation from low-light to normal-light image space, given only sets of low- and normal-light training images without any correspondence. By formulating this ill-posed problem as a modulation code learning task, our network learns to generate a collection of enhanced images from a given input conditioned on various reference images. Therefore our inference model easily adapts to various user preferences, provided with a few favorable photos from each user. Our model achieves competitive visual and quantitative results on par with fully supervised methods on both noisy and clean datasets, while being 6 to 10 times lighter than state-of-the-art generative adversarial networks (GANs) approaches.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: 2D and 3D Computer Vision
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Unsupervised Learning