LTCF-Net: A Transformer-Enhanced Dual-Channel Fourier Framework for Low-Light Image Restoration

We introduce LTCF-Net, a novel network architecture designed for enhancing low-light images. Unlike Retinex-based methods, our approach utilizes two color spaces - LAB and YUV - to efficiently separate and process color information, by leveraging the separation of luminance from chromatic components in color images. In addition, our model incorporates the Transformer architecture to comprehensively understand image content while maintaining computational efficiency. To dynamically balance the brightness in output images, we also introduce a Fourier transform module that adjusts the luminance channel in the frequency domain. This mechanism could uniformly balance brightness across different regions while eliminating background noises, and thereby enhancing visual quality. By combining these innovative components, LTCF-Net effectively improves low-light image quality while keeping the model lightweight. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches across multiple evaluation metrics and datasets, achieving more natural color restoration and a balanced brightness distribution.

MambaTrack: Exploiting Dual-Enhancement for Night UAV Tracking

Night unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is impeded by the challenges of poor illumination, with previous daylight-optimized methods demonstrating suboptimal performance in low-light conditions, limiting the utility of UAV applications. To this end, we propose an efficient mamba-based tracker, leveraging dual enhancement techniques to boost night UAV tracking. The mamba-based low-light enhancer, equipped with an illumination estimator and a damage restorer, achieves global image enhancement while preserving the details and structure of low-light images. Additionally, we advance a cross-modal mamba network to achieve efficient interactive learning between vision and language modalities. Extensive experiments showcase that our method achieves advanced performance and exhibits significantly improved computation and memory efficiency. For instance, our method is 2.8$\times$ faster than CiteTracker and reduces 50.2$\%$ GPU memory. Codes will be made publicly available.

Spatially Visual Perception for End-to-End Robotic Learning

Recent advances in imitation learning have shown significant promise for robotic control and embodied intelligence. However, achieving robust generalization across diverse mounted camera observations remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a video-based spatial perception framework that leverages 3D spatial representations to address environmental variability, with a focus on handling lighting changes. Our approach integrates a novel image augmentation technique, AugBlender, with a state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation model trained on internet-scale data. Together, these components form a cohesive system designed to enhance robustness and adaptability in dynamic scenarios. Our results demonstrate that our approach significantly boosts the success rate across diverse camera exposures, where previous models experience performance collapse. Our findings highlight the potential of video-based spatial perception models in advancing robustness for end-to-end robotic learning, paving the way for scalable, low-cost solutions in embodied intelligence.

Zero-Shot Low-Light Image Enhancement via Joint Frequency Domain Priors Guided Diffusion

Due to the singularity of real-world paired datasets and the complexity of low-light environments, this leads to supervised methods lacking a degree of scene generalisation. Meanwhile, limited by poor lighting and content guidance, existing zero-shot methods cannot handle unknown severe degradation well. To address this problem, we will propose a new zero-shot low-light enhancement method to compensate for the lack of light and structural information in the diffusion sampling process by effectively combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains to construct rich a priori information. The key to the inspiration comes from the similarity between the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains: both light and structure information are closely related to specific frequency domain regions, respectively. Therefore, by transferring the diffusion process to the wavelet low-frequency domain and combining the wavelet and Fourier frequency domains by continuously decomposing them in the inverse process, the constructed rich illumination prior is utilised to guide the image generation enhancement process. Sufficient experiments show that the framework is robust and effective in various scenarios. The code will be available at: \href{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}{https://github.com/hejh8/Joint-Wavelet-and-Fourier-priors-guided-diffusion}.

BrightVAE: Luminosity Enhancement in Underexposed Endoscopic Images

The enhancement of image luminosity is especially critical in endoscopic images. Underexposed endoscopic images often suffer from reduced contrast and uneven brightness, significantly impacting diagnostic accuracy and treatment planning. Internal body imaging is challenging due to uneven lighting and shadowy regions. Enhancing such images is essential since precise image interpretation is crucial for patient outcomes. In this paper, we introduce BrightVAE, an architecture based on the hierarchical Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (hierarchical VQ-VAE) tailored explicitly for enhancing luminosity in low-light endoscopic images. Our architecture is meticulously designed to tackle the unique challenges inherent in endoscopic imaging, such as significant variations in illumination and obscured details due to poor lighting conditions. The proposed model emphasizes advanced feature extraction from three distinct viewpoints-incorporating various receptive fields, skip connections, and feature attentions to robustly enhance image quality and support more accurate medical diagnoses. Through rigorous experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques in enhancing low-light endoscopic images. To evaluate the performance of our architecture, we employ three widely recognized metrics-SSIM, PSNR, and LPIPS-specifically on Endo4IE dataset, which consists of endoscopic images. We evaluated our method using the Endo4IE dataset, which consists exclusively of endoscopic images, and showed significant advancements over the state-of-the-art methods for enhancing luminosity in endoscopic imaging.

Text-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Network for Robust Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA) has gained significant research interest. However, current RSVQA methods are limited by the imaging mechanisms of optical sensors, particularly under challenging conditions such as cloud-covered and low-light scenarios. Given the all-time and all-weather imaging capabilities of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), it is crucial to investigate the integration of optical-SAR images to improve RSVQA performance. In this work, we propose a Text-guided Coarse-to-Fine Fusion Network (TGFNet), which leverages the semantic relationships between question text and multi-source images to guide the network toward complementary fusion at the feature level. Specifically, we develop a Text-guided Coarse-to-Fine Attention Refinement (CFAR) module to focus on key areas related to the question in complex remote sensing images. This module progressively directs attention from broad areas to finer details through key region routing, enhancing the model's ability to focus on relevant regions. Furthermore, we propose an Adaptive Multi-Expert Fusion (AMEF) module that dynamically integrates different experts, enabling the adaptive fusion of optical and SAR features. In addition, we create the first large-scale benchmark dataset for evaluating optical-SAR RSVQA methods, comprising 6,008 well-aligned optical-SAR image pairs and 1,036,694 well-labeled question-answer pairs across 16 diverse question types, including complex relational reasoning questions. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset demonstrate that our TGFNet effectively integrates complementary information between optical and SAR images, significantly improving the model's performance in challenging scenarios. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/mmic-lcl/. Index Terms: Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering, Multi-source Data Fusion, Multimodal, Remote Sensing, OPT-SAR.

Revitalizing Electoral Trust: Enhancing Transparency and Efficiency through Automated Voter Counting with Machine Learning

In order to address issues with manual vote counting during election procedures, this study intends to examine the viability of using advanced image processing techniques for automated voter counting. The study aims to shed light on how automated systems that utilize cutting-edge technologies like OpenCV, CVZone, and the MOG2 algorithm could greatly increase the effectiveness and openness of electoral operations. The empirical findings demonstrate how automated voter counting can enhance voting processes and rebuild public confidence in election outcomes, particularly in places where trust is low. The study also emphasizes how rigorous metrics, such as the F1 score, should be used to systematically compare the accuracy of automated systems against manual counting methods. This methodology enables a detailed comprehension of the differences in performance between automated and human counting techniques by providing a nuanced assessment. The incorporation of said measures serves to reinforce an extensive assessment structure, guaranteeing the legitimacy and dependability of automated voting systems inside the electoral sphere.

Dropout the High-rate Downsampling: A Novel Design Paradigm for UHD Image Restoration

With the popularization of high-end mobile devices, Ultra-high-definition (UHD) images have become ubiquitous in our lives. The restoration of UHD images is a highly challenging problem due to the exaggerated pixel count, which often leads to memory overflow during processing. Existing methods either downsample UHD images at a high rate before processing or split them into multiple patches for separate processing. However, high-rate downsampling leads to significant information loss, while patch-based approaches inevitably introduce boundary artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel design paradigm to solve the UHD image restoration problem, called D2Net. D2Net enables direct full-resolution inference on UHD images without the need for high-rate downsampling or dividing the images into several patches. Specifically, we ingeniously utilize the characteristics of the frequency domain to establish long-range dependencies of features. Taking into account the richer local patterns in UHD images, we also design a multi-scale convolutional group to capture local features. Additionally, during the decoding stage, we dynamically incorporate features from the encoding stage to reduce the flow of irrelevant information. Extensive experiments on three UHD image restoration tasks, including low-light image enhancement, image dehazing, and image deblurring, show that our model achieves better quantitative and qualitative results than state-of-the-art methods.

LuSh-NeRF: Lighting up and Sharpening NeRFs for Low-light Scenes

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have shown remarkable performances in producing novel-view images from high-quality scene images. However, hand-held low-light photography challenges NeRFs as the captured images may simultaneously suffer from low visibility, noise, and camera shakes. While existing NeRF methods may handle either low light or motion, directly combining them or incorporating additional image-based enhancement methods does not work as these degradation factors are highly coupled. We observe that noise in low-light images is always sharp regardless of camera shakes, which implies an implicit order of these degradation factors within the image formation process. To this end, we propose in this paper a novel model, named LuSh-NeRF, which can reconstruct a clean and sharp NeRF from a group of hand-held low-light images. The key idea of LuSh-NeRF is to sequentially model noise and blur in the images via multi-view feature consistency and frequency information of NeRF, respectively. Specifically, LuSh-NeRF includes a novel Scene-Noise Decomposition (SND) module for decoupling the noise from the scene representation and a novel Camera Trajectory Prediction (CTP) module for the estimation of camera motions based on low-frequency scene information. To facilitate training and evaluations, we construct a new dataset containing both synthetic and real images. Experiments show that LuSh-NeRF outperforms existing approaches. Our code and dataset can be found here: https://github.com/quzefan/LuSh-NeRF.

Enhancing Depth Image Estimation for Underwater Robots by Combining Image Processing and Machine Learning

Depth information plays a crucial role in autonomous systems for environmental perception and robot state estimation. With the rapid development of deep neural network technology, depth estimation has been extensively studied and shown potential for practical applications. However, in particularly challenging environments such as low-light and noisy underwater conditions, direct application of machine learning models may not yield the desired results. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach to enhance underwater image quality to improve depth estimation effectiveness. First, underwater images are processed through methods such as color compensation, brightness equalization, and enhancement of contrast and sharpness of objects in the image. Next, we perform depth estimation using the Udepth model on the enhanced images. Finally, the results are evaluated and presented to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of the enhanced depth image quality approach for underwater robots.