PDCE: Patch-wise Dynamic Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Abstract

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) can be reformulated as an image-specific curve estimation (CE) problem. Traditional CE-based methods struggle with issues such as uniform processing across different regions, static parameter estimation, and lack of effective global semantic enhancement. To address these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised learning framework, Patch-wise Dynamic Curve Estimation (PDCE), which dynamically adjusts and optimizes enhancement curves according to local patch brightness and the iteration process. Specifically, we present a Vision-Language Curve Discriminator (VLCD), which dynamically determines the curve type for each patch, avoiding uniformly applying the curve on the whole image. We introduce a Curve Parameter Estimator (CPE), which dynamically updates curve parameters and adjusts enhancement effects based on the output of the previous iteration. Furthermore, we design a Visual State Space-based Semantic Enhancement Module (VSEM), which captures global receptive fields and enriches semantic features through the Mamba-based U-Net architecture. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our PDCE over state-of-the-art methods for LLIE.