SELL:A Method for Low-Light Image Enhancement by Predicting Semantic Priors

In recent years, low-light image enhancement techniques have made significant progress in generating reasonable visual details. However, current methods have not yet fully utilized the full semantic prior of visual elements in low-light environments. Therefore, images generated by these low-light image enhancement methods often suffer from degraded visual quality and may even be distorted. To address this problem, we propose a method to guide low-light image enhancement by predicting semantic priors. Specifically, we train a semantic prior predictor under standard lighting conditions, which is made to learn and predict semantic prior features for low-light images by knowledge distillation on high-quality standard images. Subsequently, we utilize a semantic-aware module that enables the model to adaptively integrate these learned semantic priors, thus ensuring semantic consistency of the enhanced images. Experiments show that the method outperforms several current state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual performance on the LOL-v2 and SICE benchmark datasets. Our code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/tianzhiya/SELL</uri>.