MECNet: Multi-Scale Exposure-Consistency Learning via Fourier Transform for Exposure Correction

In the real world, due to various challenging lighting conditions such as low light, underexposure, and overexposure, captured images often exhibit undesirable appearances. Given that images with different exposure levels require different correction processes, a single neural network struggles to produce satisfactory results. We propose a coarse-to-fine exposure correction model for learning exposure consistency representation to address underexposure and overexposure issues. Building upon the bilateral activation mechanism, we introduce the Fourier transform to capture global information and fuse it with locally extracted information through convolution to achieve superior feature representation. Additionally, we employ Laplacian pyramids to decompose the source image into different spatial frequency bands, then the image details are enhanced by denoising high-frequency layers. Experimental results on the MSEC and SICE datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over current state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be made available on GitHub.