CWNet: Causal Wavelet Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Traditional Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) methods primarily focus on uniform brightness adjustment, often neglecting instance-level semantic information and the inherent characteristics of different features. To address these limitations, we propose CWNet (Causal Wavelet Network), a novel architecture that leverages wavelet transforms for causal reasoning. Specifically, our approach comprises two key components: 1) Inspired by the concept of intervention in causality, we adopt a causal reasoning perspective to reveal the underlying causal relationships in low-light enhancement. From a global perspective, we employ a metric learning strategy to ensure causal embeddings adhere to causal principles, separating them from non-causal confounding factors while focusing on the invariance of causal factors. At the local level, we introduce an instance-level CLIP semantic loss to precisely maintain causal factor consistency. 2) Based on our causal analysis, we present a wavelet transform-based backbone network that models high-frequency information through an SS2D scanning strategy aligned with high-frequency components, enabling precise recovery of high-frequency details, while complex modeling of low-frequency information is achieved by combining the advantages of Fast Fourier Convolution and wavelet convolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CWNet significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets, showcasing its robust performance across diverse scenes.