## 3 Results
### Quantitative Evaluation
Although it only lags behind HFM's aggressive color compensation (16.58) with a value of 15.50 in UICM, indicating color accuracy, its superiority over IL-NIQE reveals that HFM achieves this gain at the expense of noise. It suppresses blur most effectively in the AG metric, indicating detail preservation, by 48.99, leaving its closest competitor with a difference of about 6 points. It ranks high with an entropy value of 16.36, confirming the increased detail and color volume, while avoiding high IL-NIQE scores indicating an increase in spurious information due to noise. These results show that the proposed method provides a strong and consistent performance in both objective and perceptual metrics, preserving the color-detail balance even in the challenging low-illumination conditions of OceanDark. _Statistical significance analysis_: In order to evaluate whether the performance differences of the proposed method against different image enhancement methods are not only numerically but also statistically significant, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied. This \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline  & \multicolumn{5}{c}{**OceanDark**} \\ \cline{2-6}  & **IE \(\uparrow\)** & **UIQM \(\uparrow\)** & **UICM \(\uparrow\)** & **ILNIQE \(\downarrow\)** & **AG \(\uparrow\)** \\ \hline IBLA & 14.2814 & 0.7706 & 11.8355 & 30.6402 & 28.7766 \\ CBF & 14.9959 & 0.6494 & 11.07 & 27.3522 & 24.50 \\ WCD & 14.2466 & 0.2830 & 3.0399 & 28.4409 & 28.7920 \\ ULAP & 13.7131 & 0.6276 & 10.0865 & 34.2142 & 25.0536 \\ RGBS & 15.5645 & 0.5099 & 4.2569 & 28.7972 & 25.5566 \\ HP & 15.5311 & 0.5372 & 7.2818 & 33.6793 & 23.8611 \\ UTV & 12.9753 & 0.5372 & 3.5218 & 38.8200 & 31.2970 \\ UDCP & 13.2567 & 0.1602 & 1.4673 & 32.2065 & 25.3601 \\ FUnIEGAN & 15.354 & 0.3011 & 6.5223 & 50.3435 & 39.8643 \\ TOPAL & 15.6165 & 0.4358 & 11.472 & 42.0241 & 43.0719 \\ USUIR & 15.5521 & 0.5058 & 4.0820 & 27.3293 & 25.2927 \\ UT & 15.5159 & 0.4647 & 11.2858 & 42.9678 & 42.1335 \\
[11] & 15.5610 & 0.9899 & 13.7995 & 25.8384 & 40.9591 \\ HFM & 15.9409 & 0.9119 & 16.5827 & 25.6202 & 29.2301 \\ Our & 15.3625 & 1.1182 & 15.4978 & 23.0610 & 48.9899 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}  
* Arrows next to the metric values indicate whether a higher (\(\uparrow\)) or lower (\(\downarrow\)) score represents better performance for that specific metric.  
\end{table} 
Table 3: Quantitative comparison of average metric scores on the OceanDark dataset using reference-free quality metrics. test is especially suitable for nonparametric comparisons between dependent samples and measures the significance of the differences between the metric scores of each method pair. In the analyses, the \(p\)-values of the comparisons made between the proposed method and other methods according to the IE, IL-NIQE, AG, UIQM and UICM metrics were calculated and \(p<0.01\) was regarded as the significance level. Table 4 presents the statistical comparisons made between the proposed method and other methods on the Test-C60 dataset, and Table 4 presents the statistical comparisons made between the proposed method and other methods on the OceanDark dataset. As shown in Table 4, it is seen that the proposed method is significant superior in comparison with the majority of the compared methods in all metrics of IE, IL-NIQE, AG, UIQM and UICM. In particular, significant differences at the level of \(p<0.01\) were detected in all metrics in comparisons made with methods such as HFM, ULAP, UDCP and FUnIEGAN. Although there are partial exceptions in some comparisons made with UT, TOPAL, RGHS and [PERSON] et al. 's methods, especially in metrics such as AG and UICM, the general trend shows that the proposed method provides a statistically strong superiority. Similar to Table 4, Table 5 shows that the proposed method has significant superiority in all metrics with extremely low \(p\)-values.