Daytime-Mixed Non-Aligned Learning for Real Nighttime Image Enhancement

Enhancing real nighttime images is a significant challenge due to the deterioration of visual quality caused by limited perceptibility under adverse illumination conditions, leading to loss of details and color deviation. In this paper, we propose a novel nighttime image enhancement framework using daytime-mixed non-aligned supervision. It aims to couple the information between non-aligned daytime and nighttime image pairs. Specifically, our framework consists of a simple yet effective daytime-mixed supervised learning phase and a Retinex-based reconstruction phase. In the first phase, we employ a multi-instance with adaptive information fusion (AIF) module integrated within a UNet enhancement network called MIFUNet, which is trained via a daytime-mixed supervised loss. In the second phase, the Retinex-based reconstruction employs both a light-effect estimation network and an illumination adjustment network to restore the nighttime image, guided by physical principles. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we collect a real non-aligned day-night dataset named the NANE dataset, which contains 748 non-aligned image pairs and 100 nighttime images solely for testing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art image enhancement methods.