SeqEnhance: A Lightweight Image Processing PipeLine for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is an important task in computer vision, aiming to improve the visual perception or interpretability of images captured in poorly illuminated environments. Recently, deep learning based methods have been extensively explored to address this issue. While many of these methods have achieved significant advancements in various evaluation metrics for LLIE, only a few have made progress in improving inference speed for the resulting images. As a result, achieving both high-quality enhancements and efficient inference speed remains a challenge. To tackle this challenge, we propose SeqEnhance, a fast LLIE method based on a predefined parameterized image processing pipeline. Our approach combines the inference capabilities of deep neural networks for parameter estimation and the efficient processing capabilities of image processing pipelines to generate enhanced images in an end-to-end manner. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance on image quality evaluation metrics such as PSNR and SSIM with a fast inference speed.