Frequency-aware network for low-light image enhancement

Abstract

Low-light images often suffer from severe visual degradation, affecting both human perception and high-level computer vision tasks. Most existing methods process images in the spatial domain, making it challenging to simultaneously improve brightness while suppressing noise. In this paper, we present a novel perspective to enhance images based on frequency domain characteristics. Specifically, we reveal that the low-frequency components are closely related to luminance and color, whereas the high-frequency components are not. Based on this observation, we propose the Frequency-aware Network (FaNet) for low-light image enhancement. By selectively adjusting low-frequency components, FaNet preserves more high-frequency details while achieving low-light image enhancement. Additionally, we employ a multi-scale framework and selective fusion for effective feature learning and image reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.