Exposure Bracketing is All You Need for Unifying Image Restoration and Enhancement Tasks

It is highly desired but challenging to acquire high-quality photos with clear content in low-light environments. Although multi-image processing methods (using burst, dual-exposure, or multi-exposure images) have made significant progress in addressing this issue, they typically focus on specific restoration or enhancement problems, being insufficient in exploiting multi-image. Motivated by that multi-exposure images are complementary in denoising, deblurring, high dynamic range imaging, and super-resolution, we propose to utilize exposure bracketing photography to unify restoration and enhancement tasks in this work. Due to the difficulty in collecting real-world pairs, we suggest a solution that first pre-trains the model with synthetic paired data and then adapts it to real-world unlabeled images. In particular, a temporally modulated recurrent network (TMRNet) and self-supervised adaptation method are proposed. Moreover, we construct a data simulation pipeline to synthesize pairs and collect real-world images from 200 nighttime scenarios. Experiments on both datasets show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art multi-image processing ones. The dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/cszhilu1998/BracketIRE.