Zero-Shot Low Light Image Enhancement with Diffusion Prior

Balancing aesthetic quality with fidelity when enhancing images from challenging, degraded sources is a core objective in computational photography. In this paper, we address low light image enhancement (LLIE), a task in which dark images often contain limited visible information. Diffusion models, known for their powerful image enhancement capacities, are a natural choice for this problem. However, their deep generative priors can also lead to hallucinations, introducing non-existent elements or substantially altering the visual semantics of the original scene. In this work, we introduce a novel zero-shot method for controlling and refining the generative behavior of diffusion models for dark-to-light image conversion tasks. Our method demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods in the task of low-light image enhancement, as evidenced by both quantitative metrics and qualitative analysis.