  This paper presents a novel network structure with illumination-aware gamma
correction and complete image modelling to solve the low-light image
enhancement problem. Low-light environments usually lead to less informative
large-scale dark areas, directly learning deep representations from low-light
images is insensitive to recovering normal illumination. We propose to
integrate the effectiveness of gamma correction with the strong modelling
capacities of deep networks, which enables the correction factor gamma to be
learned in a coarse to elaborate manner via adaptively perceiving the deviated
illumination. Because exponential operation introduces high computational
complexity, we propose to use Taylor Series to approximate gamma correction,
accelerating the training and inference speed. Dark areas usually occupy large
scales in low-light images, common local modelling structures, e.g., CNN,
SwinIR, are thus insufficient to recover accurate illumination across whole
low-light images. We propose a novel Transformer block to completely simulate
the dependencies of all pixels across images via a local-to-global hierarchical
attention mechanism, so that dark areas could be inferred by borrowing the
information from far informative regions in a highly effective manner.
Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our
approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
