Deep Learning for Low-Light Vision: A Comprehensive Survey

Visual recognition in low-light environments is a challenging problem since degraded images are the stacking of multiple degradations (noise, low light and blur, etc.). It has received extensive attention from academia and industry in the era of deep learning. Existing surveys focus on low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods and normal-light visual recognition methods, while few comprehensive surveys of low-light-related vision tasks. This article provides a comprehensive survey of the latest advancements in low-light vision, including methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics, in two aspects: visual quality-driven and recognition quality-driven. On the visual quality-driven aspect, we survey a large number of very recent LLIE methods. On the recognition quality-driven aspect, we survey low-light object detection techniques in the deep learning era using more intuitive categorization method. Furthermore, a quantitative benchmarking of different methods is conducted on several widely adopted low-light vision-related datasets. Finally, we discuss the challenges that exist in low-light vision and future directions worth exploring. We provide a public website that will continue to track developments in this promising field.