Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In nighttime conditions, high noise levels and bright illumination sources degrade image quality, making low-light image enhancement challenging. Thermal images provide complementary information, offering richer textures and structural details. We propose RT-X Net, a cross-attention network that fuses RGB and thermal images for nighttime image enhancement. We leverage self-attention networks for feature extraction and a cross-attention mechanism for fusion to effectively integrate information from both modalities. To support research in this domain, we introduce the Visible-Thermal Image Enhancement Evaluation (V-TIEE) dataset, comprising 50 co-located visible and thermal images captured under diverse nighttime conditions. Extensive evaluations on the publicly available LLVIP dataset and our V-TIEE dataset demonstrate that RT-X Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in low-light image enhancement. The code and the V-TIEE can be found here https://github.com/jhakrraman/rt-xnet.
Authors: Raman Jha, Adithya Lenka, Mani Ramanagopal, Aswin Sankaranarayanan, Kaushik Mitra
Language: English
Topic: Image Enhancement Techniques
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4413277643