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NTIRE 2026 Low-light Enhancement: Twilight Cowboy Challenge

Authors

Do you know Aleksei Khalin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Egor Ershov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Artyom Panshin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Sergey Korchagin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Georgiy Lobarev?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Arseniy Terekhin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Sofiia Dorogova?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Amir Shamsutdinov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Yasin Mamedov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Bakhtiyar Khalfin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Bogdan Sheludko?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Emil Zilyaev?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Nikola Banić?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Georgy Perevozchikov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Radu Timofte?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Shuai Liu?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Yuqian Zhang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Lize Zhang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Yibin Huang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Chaoyu Feng?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Luyang Wang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Xiaotao Wang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Dongqing Zou?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Lei Lei?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Tianli Liu?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Dejun Hao?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Chunxia Lei?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Furkan Kınlı?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Andrei Mironov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Alexander Dikov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Aleksei Sadokhin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Vladimir Zvorygin?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Constantine Habarlak?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Shuwei Yue?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Egor Mirantsov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Daniil Okunev?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Dmitry Arkhipov?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Aleksandr Yugay?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Anas M. Ali?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Bilel Benjdira?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Wadii Boulila?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Wei Zhou?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Linfeng Li?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Lingdong Kong?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Jiachen Tu?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Guoyi Xu?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Yaoxin Jiang?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Jiajia Liu?You can claim authorship or link another user.Do you know Yaokun Shi?You can claim authorship or link another user.

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.

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Publication notes

Author note
11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table