Deep Light Pollution Removal in Night Cityscape Photographs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Hao, Wu, Xiaolin, Zhang, Xi, Sun, Baoqing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Wang, Hao
Wu, Xiaolin
Zhang, Xi
Sun, Baoqing
author_facet Wang, Hao
Wu, Xiaolin
Zhang, Xi
Sun, Baoqing
contents Nighttime photography is severely degraded by light pollution induced by pervasive artificial lighting in urban environments. After long-range scattering and spatial diffusion, unwanted artificial light overwhelms natural night luminance, generates skyglow that washes out the view of stars and celestial objects and produces halos and glow artifacts around light sources. Unlike nighttime dehazing, which aims to improve detail legibility through thick air, the objective of light pollution removal is to restore the pristine night appearance by neutralizing the radiative footprint of ground lighting. In this paper we introduce a physically-based degradation model that adds to the previous ones for nighttime dehazing two critical aspects; (i) anisotropic spread of directional light sources, and (ii) skyglow caused by invisible surface lights behind skylines. In addition, we construct a training strategy that leverages large generative model and synthetic-real coupling to compensate for the scarcity of paired real data and enhance generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation and learning framework substantially reduce light pollution artifacts and better recover authentic night imagery than prior nighttime restoration methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_09145
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Light Pollution Removal in Night Cityscape Photographs
Wang, Hao
Wu, Xiaolin
Zhang, Xi
Sun, Baoqing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Nighttime photography is severely degraded by light pollution induced by pervasive artificial lighting in urban environments. After long-range scattering and spatial diffusion, unwanted artificial light overwhelms natural night luminance, generates skyglow that washes out the view of stars and celestial objects and produces halos and glow artifacts around light sources. Unlike nighttime dehazing, which aims to improve detail legibility through thick air, the objective of light pollution removal is to restore the pristine night appearance by neutralizing the radiative footprint of ground lighting. In this paper we introduce a physically-based degradation model that adds to the previous ones for nighttime dehazing two critical aspects; (i) anisotropic spread of directional light sources, and (ii) skyglow caused by invisible surface lights behind skylines. In addition, we construct a training strategy that leverages large generative model and synthetic-real coupling to compensate for the scarcity of paired real data and enhance generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation and learning framework substantially reduce light pollution artifacts and better recover authentic night imagery than prior nighttime restoration methods.
title Deep Light Pollution Removal in Night Cityscape Photographs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.09145