NIR-assisted Video Enhancement via Unpaired 24-hour Data

Low-light video enhancement in the visible (VIS) range is important yet technically challenging, and it is likely to become more tractable by introducing near-infrared (NIR) information for assistance, which in turn arouses a new challenge on how to obtain appropriate multispectral data for model training. In this paper, we defend the feasibility and superiority of NIR-assisted low-light video enhancement results by using unpaired 24-hour data for the first time, which significantly eases data collection and improves generalization performance on in-the-wild data. By accounting for different physical characteristics between unpaired daytime and nighttime videos, we first propose to turn daytime NIR & VIS into "nighttime mode". Specifically, we design a heuristic yet physics-inspired relighting algorithm to produce realistic pseudo nighttime NIR, and use a resampling strategy followed by a noiseGAN for nighttime VIS conversion. We further devise a temporal-aware network for video enhancement that extracts and fuses bi-directional temporal streams and is trained using real daytime videos and pseudo nighttime videos. We capture multi-spectral data using a co-axial camera and contribute Fulltime Multi-Spectral Video Dataset (FMSVD), the first dataset including aligned 24-hour NIR & VIS videos. Compared to alternative methods, we achieve significantly improved video quality as well as generalization ability on in-the-wild data in terms of both evaluation metrics and visual judgment. Codes and Data Available: https://github.com/MyNiuuu/NVEU.