Feature Map Guided Adapter Network for Object Detection in Low-light Conditions

Conventional ISP pipelines and image enhancement methods are designed and optimized for human vision, creating a gap between the requirements of computer and human visions. To bridge the requirement gap, we present a co-design framework in which backend computer vision plays a pivotal role in shaping the proceeding image processing algorithm. It features a pre- processing adapter network, responsible for the restoration and enhancement of RAW images from computer vision perspective, especially in challenging environmental conditions. Specifically, we extract feature maps from the backend vision network, utilizing them as constraints for optimizing the preprocessing adapter network. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we employ object detection in low-light conditions as the computer vision task, with YOLO-v5 as the backbone. Given the considerable noise in low-light images, we compare our results with state-of-the-art denoising algorithms, showcasing the superior performance of our framework.