PIA: Parallel Architecture with Illumination Allocator for Joint Enhancement and Detection in Low-Light

Visual perception in low-light conditions (e.g., nighttime) plays an important role in various multimedia-related applications (e.g., autonomous driving). The enhancement (provides a visual-friendly appearance) and detection (detects the instances of objects) in low-light are two fundamental and crucial visual perception tasks. In this paper, we make efforts on how to simultaneously realize low-light enhancement and detection from two aspects. First, we define a parallel architecture to satisfy the task demand for both two tasks. In which, a decomposition-type warm-start acting on the entrance of parallel architecture is developed to narrow down the adverse effects brought by low-light scenes to some extent. Second, a novel illumination allocator is designed by encoding the key illumination component (the inherent difference between normal-light and low-light) to extract hierarchical features for assisting in enhancement and detection. Further, we make a substantive discussion for our proposed method. That is, we solve enhancement in a coarse-to-fine manner and handle detection in a decomposed-to-integrated fashion. Finally, multidimensional analytical and evaluated experiments are performed to indicate our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at \urlhttps://github.com/tengyu1998/PIA