NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge
2026-08-10 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors review a competition where teams worked to combine multiple shaky and noisy smartphone photos taken in low light into one clear picture. They created a challenging dataset with almost 600 real scenes to test the teams' methods in both indoor and outdoor dark settings. The competition used a step-by-step testing process and saw ten teams improve significantly over the baseline results. This shows better ways to reduce noise and fix blurriness caused by hand movement in low-light photography.
low-light photographymulti-frame image fusionraw image processingnoise reductionimage alignmentPSNRSSIMcomputational photographybenchmark datasetblind assessment
Authors
Aleksei Khalin, Egor Ershov, Artyom Panshin, Sergey Korchagin, Georgiy Lobarev, Arseniy Terekhin, Sofiia Dorogova, Amir Shamsutdinov, Yasin Mamedov, Bakhtiyar Khalfin, Bogdan Sheludko, Emil Zilyaev, Nikola Banić, Georgy Perevozchikov, Radu Timofte, Shuai Liu, Yuqian Zhang, Lize Zhang, Yibin Huang, Chaoyu Feng, Luyang Wang, Xiaotao Wang, Dongqing Zou, Lei Lei, Tianli Liu, Dejun Hao, Chunxia Lei, Furkan Kınlı, Andrei Mironov, Alexander Dikov, Aleksei Sadokhin, Vladimir Zvorygin, Constantine Habarlak, Shuwei Yue, Egor Mirantsov, Daniil Okunev, Dmitry Arkhipov, Aleksandr Yugay, Anas M. Ali, Bilel Benjdira, Wadii Boulila, Wei Zhou, Linfeng Li, Lingdong Kong, Jiachen Tu, Guoyi Xu, Yaoxin Jiang, Jiajia Liu, Yaokun Shi
Abstract
This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge. The objective of the competition was to merge a set of misaligned smartphone images in the raw domain, captured in low-light conditions, into a single, clean image. Introduced setup simultaneously addresses two problems of low-light photography: visual degradations such as high noise and mixed scene illuminants, and the geometric inconsistencies caused by hand movement during multi-frame capture. To advance research in low-light and nighttime computational photography, a challenging dataset was collected comprising 585 real-world scenes, spanning indoor low-light and outdoor nighttime conditions, for training and benchmarking participant solutions. The competition employed a three-stage evaluation protocol: automatic validation via the CodaBench platform in stages one and two, followed by blind assessment on a private test set for the final ranking. Ten teams surpassed the established baseline, achieving improvements of up to +6.49 dB in PSNR and +0.0101 in SSIM, thereby establishing new state-of-the-art performance for burst-based low-light image enhancement. These results demonstrate significant progress in handling real-world noise, motion, and illumination variability in the low-light setting. Comprehensive results, leaderboards, and additional information are publicly available at https://nightimaging.org.