Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2608.09782

NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge

Aleksei Khalin·Egor Ershov·Artyom Panshin·Sergey Korchagin·Georgiy Lobarev·Arseniy Terekhin·Sofiia Dorogova·Amir Shamsutdinov·Yasin Mamedov·Bakhtiyar Khalfin·Bogdan Sheludko·Emil Zilyaev·Nikola Banić·Georgy Perevozchikov·Radu Timofte·Shuai Liu·Yuqian Zhang·Lize Zhang·Yibin Huang·Chaoyu Feng·Luyang Wang·Xiaotao Wang·Dongqing Zou·Lei Lei·Tianli Liu·Dejun Hao·Chunxia Lei·Furkan Kınlı·Andrei Mironov·Alexander Dikov·Aleksei Sadokhin·Vladimir Zvorygin·Constantine Habarlak·Shuwei Yue·Egor Mirantsov·Daniil Okunev·Dmitry Arkhipov·Aleksandr Yugay·Anas M. Ali·Bilel Benjdira·Wadii Boulila·Wei Zhou·Linfeng Li·Lingdong Kong·Jiachen Tu·Guoyi Xu·Yaoxin Jiang·Jiajia Liu·Yaokun Shi
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge. The objective of the competition was to merge a set of misaligned smartphone images in the raw domain, captured in low-light conditions, into a single, clean image. Introduced setup simultaneously addresses two problems of low-light photography: visual degradations such as high noise and mixed scene illuminants, and the geometric inconsistencies caused by hand movement during multi-frame capture. To advance research in low-light and nighttime computational photography, a challenging dataset was collected comprising 585 real-world scenes, spanning indoor low-light and outdoor nighttime conditions, for training and benchmarking participant solutions. The competition employed a three-stage evaluation protocol: automatic validation via the CodaBench platform in stages one and two, followed by blind assessment on a private test set for the final ranking. Ten teams surpassed the established baseline, achieving improvements of up to +6.49 dB in PSNR and +0.0101 in SSIM, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art performance for burst-based low-light image enhancement. These results demonstrate significant progress in handling real-world noise, motion, and illumination variability in the low-light setting. Comprehensive results, leaderboards, and additional information are publicly available at https://nightimaging.org.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Aleksei Khalin, Egor Ershov, Artyom Panshin, Sergey Korchagin, Georgiy Lobarev, Arseniy Terekhin, Sofiia Dorogova, Amir Shamsutdinov, Yasin Mamedov, Bakhtiyar Khalfin, Bogdan Sheludko, Emil Zilyaev, Nikola Banić, Georgy Perevozchikov, Radu Timofte, Shuai Liu, Yuqian Zhang, Lize Zhang, Yibin Huang, Chaoyu Feng, Luyang Wang, Xiaotao Wang, Dongqing Zou, Lei Lei, Tianli Liu, Dejun Hao, Chunxia Lei, Furkan Kınlı, Andrei Mironov, Alexander Dikov, Aleksei Sadokhin, Vladimir Zvorygin, Constantine Habarlak, Shuwei Yue, Egor Mirantsov, Daniil Okunev, Dmitry Arkhipov, Aleksandr Yugay, Anas M. Ali, Bilel Benjdira, Wadii Boulila, Wei Zhou, Linfeng Li, Lingdong Kong, Jiachen Tu, Guoyi Xu, Yaoxin Jiang, Jiajia Liu, Yaokun Shi. 2026-08-10. NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09782

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Lifelong Learning of Video Diffusion Models From a Single Video Stream

Video diffusion models can enable embodied agents to anticipate plausible futures from the recent past, but they are typically trained offline on curated datasets--a mismatch with the agents' learning setup at deployment: online, from a single video stream that sequentially outputs one frame at a time. We bridge this training gap and demonstrate that training autoregressive video diffusion models from such a stream, resembling the experience of embodied agents, is not only possible but can also perform comparably to standard offline training given the same number of gradient steps. We find that this robustness to video stream autocorrelation and nonstationarity can be achieved using experience replay methods that retain a subset of the video stream. To support training and evaluation in this setting, we introduce five new datasets for streaming lifelong generative video modeling: Lifelong Bouncing Balls (O), Lifelong Bouncing Balls (C), Lifelong 3D Maze, Lifelong Drive, and Lifelong PLAICraft, each consisting of one million consecutive frames from environments of increasing complexity. Together, our datasets and experiments lay the groundwork for video generative models and world models that continuously learn from single-sensor video streams rather than fixed datasets.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Bayesian Fusion of Active Contour Models and ConvNet Priors for Standing Dead Tree Segmentation

Instance segmentation is a core computer vision task with great practical significance. Recent advances, driven by large-scale benchmark datasets, have yielded good general-purpose Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based methods. Natural Resource Monitoring (NRM) utilizes remote sensing imagery with generally known scale and containing multiple overlapping instances of the same class, wherein the object contours are jagged and highly irregular. This is in stark contrast with the regular man-made objects found in classic benchmark datasets. We address this problem and propose a novel instance segmentation method geared towards NRM imagery. We formulate the problem as Bayesian maximum a posteriori inference which, in learning the individual object contours, incorporates shape, location, and position priors from state-of-the-art CNN architectures, driving a simultaneous level-set evolution of multiple object contours. We employ loose coupling between the CNNs that supply the priors and the active contour process, allowing a drop-in replacement of new network architectures. Moreover, we introduce a novel prior for contour shape, namely, a class of Deep Shape Models based on architectures from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These Deep Shape Models are in essence a non-linear generalization of the classic Eigenshape formulation. In experiments, we tackle the challenging, real-world problem of segmenting individual dead tree crowns and delineating precise contours. We compare our method to two leading general-purpose instance segmentation methods - Mask R-CNN and K-net - on color infrared aerial imagery. Results show our approach to significantly outperform both methods in terms of reconstruction quality of tree crown contours. Furthermore, use of the GAN-based deep shape model prior yields significant improvement of all results over the vanilla Eigenshape prior.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Sonicmesh: Enhancing 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction in Vision-Impaired Environments With Acoustic Signals

3D human mesh reconstruction (HMR) from RGB images often degrades under poor illumination, occlusion, and non-line-of-sight conditions. Acoustic sensing provides complementary spatial cues but suffers from low spatial resolution. We propose SonicMesh, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first acoustic--visual framework for robust 3D human mesh reconstruction. SonicMesh first converts ultrasonic echoes into range--azimuth acoustic images through an Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR)-based imaging process. It then introduces a cross-dimensional anatomical registration module that maps modality-specific 2D joint features into a common canonical 3D human space. The registered anatomical representations are further integrated with acoustic and visual features through a two-stage fusion network for final mesh reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that SonicMesh achieves accurate and robust 3D human reconstruction across normal, poor-light, occluded, and non-line-of-sight environments, consistently outperforming existing RGB-, radio-frequency (RF)-, and mmWave-based approaches under challenging sensing conditions.

cs.CV↗