CRISP: Progressive Illumination Curriculum for Recurrent Low-Light Video Enhancement with Semantic Priors

Overview & Synopsis

Low-light video enhancement requires the recovery of brightness, color, and fine spatial structures while preserving temporal coherence in the presence of noise and motion. Existing methods often struggle to balance these objectives, particularly in severely degraded regions. This paper presents CRISP, a recurrent framework trained using a progressive illumination curriculum. Its two-frame recurrent architecture propagates information across successive frames to exploit temporal context beyond the immediate input pair. During training, supervision progressively transitions from intermediate targets interpolated between the low-light input and the reference to the full reference, gradually increasing the required brightness and color correction. This curriculum stabilizes recurrent training without introducing additional inference cost and yields the largest performance improvement among the components evaluated in the ablation study. To further support structural reconstruction, the framework optionally incorporates frozen DINOv3 semantic features through adaptive layer normalization (AdaLN)-style modulation, without fine-tuning the foundation model. Experiments on DID and BVI-RLV demonstrate that CRISP achieves the highest PSNR on DID and the highest SSIM on BVI-RLV among the evaluated methods, while maintaining computational efficiency.