FlowLUT: Efficient Image Enhancement via Differentiable LUTs and Iterative Flow Matching
This addresses the problem of real-time image enhancement with high quality for applications like photography or video processing, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing LUT and flow matching techniques.
The paper tackles the trade-off between computational efficiency and representational capacity in deep learning-based image enhancement by introducing FlowLUT, which integrates differentiable LUTs and iterative flow matching to achieve scene-adaptive color correction and detail restoration, resulting in improved performance on three benchmarks.
Deep learning-based image enhancement methods face a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and representational capacity. For example, although a conventional three-dimensional Look-Up Table (3D LUT) can process a degraded image in real time, it lacks representational flexibility and depends solely on a fixed prior. To address this problem, we introduce FlowLUT, a novel end-to-end model that integrates the efficiency of LUTs, multiple priors, and the parameter-independent characteristic of flow-matched reconstructed images. Specifically, firstly, the input image is transformed in color space by a collection of differentiable 3D LUTs (containing a large number of 3D LUTs with different priors). Subsequently, a lightweight content-aware dynamically predicts fusion weights, enabling scene-adaptive color correction with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ complexity. Next, a lightweight fusion prediction network runs on multiple 3D LUTs, with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ complexity for scene-adaptive color correction.Furthermore, to address the inherent representation limitations of LUTs, we design an innovative iterative flow matching method to restore local structural details and eliminate artifacts. Finally, the entire model is jointly optimized under a composite loss function enforcing perceptual and structural fidelity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three benchmarks.