Thermal-Aware Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Real-World Benchmark and a New Light-Weight Model

Enhancing images captured under low-light conditions has been a topic of research for several years. Nonetheless, existing image restoration techniques mainly concentrate on reconstructing images from RGB data, often neglecting the possibility of utilizing additional modalities. With the progress in handheld technology, capturing thermal maps with mobile devices has become straightforward. Investigating the integration of thermal data into image restoration presents a valuable research opportunity. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multimodal low-light image enhancement task based on thermal information and establish a dataset named TLIE (Thermal-aware Low-light Image Enhancement), consisting of 1,113 samples. Each sample in our dataset includes a lowlight image, a normal-light image, and the corresponding thermal map. Additionally, based on the TLIE dataset, we develop a multimodal approach that simultaneously processes input images and thermal map data to produce the predicted normal-light images. We compare our method with previous unimodal and multimodal state-of-the-art LIE methods, and the experimental results and detailed ablation studies prove the effectiveness of our method.