Severe Light, Textureless Sight: A Benchmark for Extreme Exposure Correction

Exposure correction aims to restore underexposed and overexposed images to normal exposed images in a single network. However, conventional methods primarily focus on correcting non-extreme exposure cases and struggle to accurately restore lightness and structure information in extreme exposure scenarios. Through a thorough investigation, we observe that the extreme exposure correction task is limited by the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets. To address the above challenges, in this paper, we construct the first Extreme Exposure Dataset named EED by manually collecting a large number of diverse scenes. By introducing probabilistic blur kernel, EED not only ensures the rich diversity and brightness distribution of scenes but also approaches the degradation of the real world. To achieve exposure correction in extreme conditions, we propose a novel Extreme Exposure Correction Network by leveraging the mask-aware Fourier transform prior, which decouples lightness and structure components precisely. To restore severe abnormal lightness and lost structure information in extreme exposure scenes, we introduce a well-exposed referenced image to guide the coarse restoration and employ a Timestep-guided Frequency Diffusion Module for further refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our dataset and method. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/juvenoia/EED.