Multi-Domain Multi-Scale Diffusion Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in low-light image enhancement. However, there remain two practical limitations: (1) existing methods mainly focus on the spatial domain for the diffusion process, while neglecting the essential features in the frequency domain; (2) conventional patch-based sampling strategy inevitably leads to severe checkerboard artifacts due to the uneven overlapping. To address these limitations in one go, we propose a Multi-Domain Multi-Scale (MDMS) diffusion model for low-light image enhancement. In particular, we introduce a spatial-frequency fusion module to seamlessly integrates spatial and frequency information. By leveraging the Multi-Domain Learning (MDL) paradigm, our proposed model is endowed with the capability to adaptively facilitate noise distribution learning, thereby enhancing the quality of the generated images. Meanwhile, we propose a Multi-Scale Sampling (MSS) strategy that follows a divide-ensemble manner by merging the restored patches under different resolutions. Such a multi-scale learning paradigm explicitly derives patch information from different granularities, thus leading to smoother boundaries. Furthermore, we empirically adopt the Bright Channel Prior (BCP) which indicates natural statistical regularity as an additional restoration guidance. Experimental results on LOL and LOLv2 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for the low-light image enhancement task. Codes are available at https://github.com/Oliiveralien/MDMS.