Zero-Shot Low-Light Image Enhancement via Diffusion with Joint Frequency and Spatial Guidance

Abstract

Existing zero-shot low-light image enhancement methods often underutilize image priors, leading to noise amplification and color distortion. To address these issues, we propose a zero-shot framework for low-light image enhancement. The framework first performs illumination-aware self-supervised denoising to generate a cleaner reference image, which is then used to guide diffusion-based enhancement with a pre-trained backbone. Specifically, the denoising module uses pairwise downsampling together with the proposed illumination prior to suppress noise in dark regions. We then guide the reverse sampling of the pre-trained diffusion model with a refinement strategy operating in both the frequency and spatial domains, so that illumination enhancement and local detail refinement can be jointly achieved during sampling. At each step, Fourier-based reconstruction contributes to illumination enhancement while preserving structural information, and illumination-guided spatial adjustment further refines local brightness. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that the proposed method improves illumination while preserving structural details.