Low-light Image Enhancement Quality Assessment: A Real-World Dataset and An Objective Method

摘要

Low-light Image Enhancement (LIE) technology adaptively improves brightness while preserving texture details and suppressing noise artifacts, thereby reducing visual degradation caused by insufficient illumination. While deep learning-based image enhancement algorithms have made significant progress, a key gap remains in establishing standardized methods for fairly evaluating and comparing their performance. To bridge this gap, this paper systematically investigates enhanced low-light image quality assessment from both subjective and objective dimensions. First, we introduce a Real-world Low-light Image Enhancement quality assessment dataset (RLIE), which contains 1540 images from 154 scenarios, each with a subjective score given by the subjects. Based on this, we propose a low light enhanced image quality assessment method based on Multi-level Illumination Injection and Hierarchical Discrepancy Perception (MIIHDP). The core idea of this method is to hierarchically inject separated illumination information into the feature extraction process, then tailor the processing of difference information at different scales to obtain a more comprehensive representation. Finally, extensive statistical analyses demonstrate the rationality of the proposed RLIE dataset, and experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed MIIHDP compared with state-of-the-arts. Our dataset and code are released at: https://github.com/BoHu90/RLIE.