Abstract
This paper presents an objective assessment of post-enhancement compression for low-light video. A controlled dataset of 11 ten-second sequences was captured under low-light and extreme low-light conditions, enhanced using ZERO-DCE, LLIE-Former, LLIE-Diff, and DaVinci Resolve Auto-Balance, and encoded using H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC at Constant Rate Factor (CRF) values of 22, 28, 34, and 40. The encoded outputs were evaluated using PSNR, SSIM, VMAF, and CAMBI, with full-reference metrics computed against the corresponding pre-compression enhanced sequences to quantify compression-induced degradation. Results show that post-enhancement compression affects metric-based quality, compression efficiency, and banding risk. Under the constrained implementation used in this study, LLIE-Diff achieved the highest post-compression PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF scores, while CAMBI indicated increased banding risk at higher CRF values, particularly for LLIE-Diff and ZERO-DCE. DaVinci Resolve Auto-Balance showed the highest variability across source sequences and encoding conditions. These findings suggest that post-compression performance is metric-dependent and that low-light enhancement methods should be evaluated under post-enhancement compression, particularly for practical storage and transmission workflows.