Taming Lookup Tables for Efficient Image Retouching

The widespread use of high-definition screens in edge devices, such as end-user cameras, smartphones, and televisions, is spurring a significant demand for image enhancement. Existing enhancement models often optimize for high performance while falling short of reducing hardware inference time and power consumption, especially on edge devices with constrained computing and storage resources. To this end, we propose Image Color Enhancement LookUp Table (ICELUT) that adopts LUTs for extremely efficient edge inference, without any convolutional neural network (CNN). During training, we leverage pointwise (1×1) convolution to extract color information, alongside a split fully connected layer to incorporate global information. Both components are then seamlessly converted into LUTs for hardware-agnostic deployment. ICELUT achieves near-state-of-the-art performance and remarkably low power consumption. We observe that the pointwise network structure exhibits robust scalability, upkeeping the performance even with a heavily downsampled 32×32 input image. These enable ICELUT, the first-ever purely LUT-based image enhancer, to reach an unprecedented speed of 0.5ms on GPU and 7ms on CPU, at least one order faster than any CNN solution.