Retinex-RAWMamba: Bridging Demosaicing and Denoising for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement
This addresses low-light image enhancement for photography and vision applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods by better integrating demosaicing into the pipeline.
The paper tackles the challenge of enhancing low-light RAW images by bridging demosaicing and denoising, proposing a Mamba-based method with a Retinex decomposition module to reduce color distortions and improve denoising, achieving state-of-the-art performance on SID and MCR datasets.
Low-light image enhancement, particularly in cross-domain tasks such as mapping from the raw domain to the sRGB domain, remains a significant challenge. Many deep learning-based methods have been developed to address this issue and have shown promising results in recent years. However, single-stage methods, which attempt to unify the complex mapping across both domains, leading to limited denoising performance. In contrast, existing two-stage approaches typically overlook the characteristic of demosaicing within the Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, leading to color distortions under varying lighting conditions, especially in low-light scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel Mamba-based method customized for low light RAW images, called RAWMamba, to effectively handle raw images with different CFAs. Furthermore, we introduce a Retinex Decomposition Module (RDM) grounded in Retinex prior, which decouples illumination from reflectance to facilitate more effective denoising and automatic non-linear exposure correction, reducing the effect of manual linear illumination enhancement. By bridging demosaicing and denoising, better enhancement for low light RAW images is achieved. Experimental evaluations conducted on public datasets SID and MCR demonstrate that our proposed RAWMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/Cynicarlos/RetinexRawMamba.