Task-Aware Low-Light Image Enhancement Method for Underground Coal Mine Monitoring

Video AI recognition is crucial for coal mine safety, but complex environments often yield low-quality images, hindering intelligent monitoring. Existing enhancement methods typically focus on image quality alone, lacking adaptability to specific tasks. Therefore, we propose Mine-DCE-YDT: a task-aware low-light image enhancement model that jointly optimizes enhancement with downstream object detection, ensuring enhanced images are both visually clearer and more conducive to accurate detection. Firstly, an improved Zero-DCE algorithm (Mine-DCE) is presented by introducing a Brightness-aware Mask Coordinate Attention (BMCA) module to improve illumination balance in the Value channel of the HSV image and a Multi-scale Detail Enhancement (MDE) module to reinforce textures and suppress noise. Then, Mine-DCE is co-modeled with YOLOv11n by training end-to-end via a joint loss fusing detection and enhancement quality losses to form Mine-DCE-YDT, which can enhance specific details containing image detection targets. Experimental results show that compared with Zero-DCE, Mine-DCE-YDT achieves reductions of 9.5% in NIQE and 35.5% in BRISQUE on the custom-constructed MineDataset and exhibits great enhancement performance on the public dataset LOL-V1. For the miner detection task in MineDataset, the integration of Mine-DCE-YDT with YOLOv11n achieves increases of 2.8% and 8.3% in mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing task-critical image features.