RICNET: Retinex-Inspired Illumination Curve Estimation for Low-Light Enhancement in Industrial Welding Scenes

Feature tracking is essential for welding crawler robots' trajectory planning. As welding often occurs in dark environments like pipelines or ship hulls, the system requires low-light image capture for laser tracking. However, such images typically have poor brightness and contrast, degrading both weld seam feature extraction and trajectory anomaly detection accuracy. To address this, we propose a Retinex-based low-light enhancement network tailored for cladding scenarios. The network features an illumination curve estimation module and requires no paired or unpaired reference images during training, alleviating the need for cladding-specific datasets. It adaptively adjusts brightness, restores image details, and effectively suppresses noise. Extensive experiments on public (LOLv1 and LOLv2) and self-collected weld datasets show that our method outperformed existing approaches in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Additionally, weld seam segmentation under low-light conditions achieved 95.1% IoU and 98.9% accuracy, confirming the method's effectiveness for downstream tasks in robotic welding.