On the Global Photometric Alignment for Low-Level Vision

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Mingjia, Du, Tianle, Wang, Hainuo, Hu, Qiming, Guo, Xiaojie
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Li, Mingjia
Du, Tianle
Wang, Hainuo
Hu, Qiming
Guo, Xiaojie
author_facet Li, Mingjia
Du, Tianle
Wang, Hainuo
Hu, Qiming
Guo, Xiaojie
contents Supervised low-level vision models rely on pixel-wise losses against paired references, yet paired training sets exhibit per-pair photometric inconsistency, say, different image pairs demand different global brightness, color, or white-balance mappings. This inconsistency enters through task-intrinsic photometric transfer (e.g., low-light enhancement) or unintended acquisition shifts (e.g., de-raining), and in either case causes an optimization pathology. Standard reconstruction losses allocate disproportionate gradient budget to conflicting per-pair photometric targets, crowding out content restoration. In this paper, we investigate this issue and prove that, under least-squares decomposition, the photometric and structural components of the prediction-target residual are orthogonal, and that the spatially dense photometric component dominates the gradient energy. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Photometric Alignment Loss (PAL). This flexible supervision objective discounts nuisance photometric discrepancy via closed-form affine color alignment while preserving restoration-relevant supervision, requiring only covariance statistics and tiny matrix inversion with negligible overhead. Across 6 tasks, 16 datasets, and 16 architectures, PAL consistently improves metrics and generalization. The implementation is in the appendix.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08172
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Global Photometric Alignment for Low-Level Vision
Li, Mingjia
Du, Tianle
Wang, Hainuo
Hu, Qiming
Guo, Xiaojie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Supervised low-level vision models rely on pixel-wise losses against paired references, yet paired training sets exhibit per-pair photometric inconsistency, say, different image pairs demand different global brightness, color, or white-balance mappings. This inconsistency enters through task-intrinsic photometric transfer (e.g., low-light enhancement) or unintended acquisition shifts (e.g., de-raining), and in either case causes an optimization pathology. Standard reconstruction losses allocate disproportionate gradient budget to conflicting per-pair photometric targets, crowding out content restoration. In this paper, we investigate this issue and prove that, under least-squares decomposition, the photometric and structural components of the prediction-target residual are orthogonal, and that the spatially dense photometric component dominates the gradient energy. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Photometric Alignment Loss (PAL). This flexible supervision objective discounts nuisance photometric discrepancy via closed-form affine color alignment while preserving restoration-relevant supervision, requiring only covariance statistics and tiny matrix inversion with negligible overhead. Across 6 tasks, 16 datasets, and 16 architectures, PAL consistently improves metrics and generalization. The implementation is in the appendix.
title On the Global Photometric Alignment for Low-Level Vision
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08172