Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge at NTIRE 2026
Abstract
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final results. The objective of this challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing clearer and visually compelling images in diverse and challenging conditions by learning representative visual cues with the purpose of restoring information loss due to low-contrast and noisy images. A total of 195 participants registered for the first track and 153 for the second track of the competition, and 22 teams ultimately submitted valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advances in (joint denoising and) low-light image enhancement, showcasing the significant progress in the field, while leveraging samples of our novel dataset.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.17669,
title = {Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge at NTIRE 2026},
author = {George Ciubotariu and Sharif S M A and Abdur Rehman and Fayaz Ali Dharejo and Rizwan Ali Naqvi and Marcos V. Conde and Radu Timofte and Zhi Jin and Hongjun Wu and Wenjian Zhang and Chang Ye and Xunpeng Yi and Qinglong Yan and Yibing Zhang and Zaynab Ali and Saiprasad Meesiyawar and Varda I Pattanshetty and Varsha I Pattanshetty and Nikhil Akalwadi and Padmashree Desai and Ramesh Ashok Tabib and Uma Mudenagudi and Hao Yang and Ruikun Zhang and Liyuan Pan and Furkan Kınlı and Donghun Ryou and Inju Ha and Junoh Kang and Bohyung Han and Wei Zhou and Yuval Haitman and Ariel Lapid and Reuven Peretz and Idit Diamant and Leilei Cao and Shuo Zhang and Praful Hambarde and Prateek Shaily and Jayant Kumar and Hardik Sharma and Aashish Negi and Sachin Chaudhary and Akshay Dudhane and Amit Shukla and MoHao Wu and Lin Wang and Jiachen Tu and Guoyi Xu and Yaoxin Jiang and Jiajia Liu and Yaokun Shi and Raul Balmez and Alexandru Brateanu and Ciprian Orhei and Cosmin Ancuti and Codruta O. Ancuti and Bilel Benjdira and Anas M. Ali and Wadii Boulila and Kaifan Qiao and Bofei Chen and Jingyi Xu and Duo Zhang and Xin Deng and Mai Xu and Shengxi Li and Lai Jiang and Harini A and Ananya N and Lakshanya K and Ying Xu and Xinyi Zhu and Shijun Shi and Jiangning Zhang and Yong Liu and Kai Hu and Jing Xu and Xianfang Zeng and Jinao Song and Guangsheng Tang and Cheng Li and Yuqiang Yang and Ziyi Wang and Yan Chen and Long Bao and Heng Sun and Mohab Kishawy and Jun Chen and Wan-Chi Siu and Yihao Cheng and Hon Man Hammond Lee and Chun-Chuen Hui},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17669},
year = {2026}
}