Enhancing low-light images with MSHCDI-Net: A multi-scale hybrid cross-domain interaction approach

Bin Chen, Peitao Li, Chaobing Zheng, Meng Jia and Shiqian Wu

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 7, 1-21

Abstract: Low-light image enhancement aims to improve visual visibility and perceptual quality under challenging illumination conditions. However, conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited in modeling long-range dependencies due to their restricted receptive fields, which often leads to insufficient global context modeling and suboptimal restoration results. To address this limitation, we propose MSHCDI-Net, a Multi-Scale Hybrid Cross-Domain Interaction Network that effectively integrates CNN and Transformer branches to jointly capture local texture details and global contextual relationships. Specifically, the proposed framework adopts a hierarchical encoder–decoder architecture to perform multi-scale feature extraction and progressive reconstruction. A cross-domain interaction mechanism is introduced to facilitate effective information exchange between convolutional and Transformer representations across multiple resolutions, enabling complementary modeling of fine-grained structures and long-range dependencies. Through adaptive feature fusion and multi-scale guidance, the network achieves improved structural consistency and detail restoration in low-light scenes. Extensive experiments on several public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. MSHCDI-Net achieves 23.45 dB PSNR / 0.848 SSIM on LOL-v1, 23.74 dB / 0.910 SSIM on LOL-v2-synthetic, and 22.24 dB / 0.868 SSIM on LOL-v2-real, demonstrating competitive performance in both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0352326

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0352326

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