IllumiSIFT: A Cascade Framework for DoG Pyramid Learning in Darkness

In visual object recognition problems, low light exposure and low-quality images present significant challenges in navigation, surveillance, and image retrieval applications, where reliable feature detection is critical. Although recent deep learning–based image enhancement methods improve visual quality in the pixel domain, these improvements often do not translate to downstream machine vision performance, as important local gradient structures required for stable key point detection are frequently suppressed. In this work, we propose IllumiSIFT, a task-driven dark image enhancement framework that focuses on preserving Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) key points by directly learning the Difference-of-Gaussian (DoG) pyramid from low-light image inputs. Unlike conventional pixel-level recovery approaches, the proposed method employs a cascaded residual learning architecture to predict Gaussian-blurred representations at multiple scales, enabling the generation of enhanced DoG images that are inherently aligned with the SIFT detection process. Extensive experiments conducted on the CDVS, Oxford Buildings, and Paris datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art enhancement methods in downstream SIFT matching performance under severe low-light conditions. These results confirm that gradient-domain, task-aligned enhancement provides a more effective and practical solution for recognition-centric low-light imaging applications.