Explaining image enhancement black-box methods through a path planning based algorithm

Nowadays, image-to-image translation methods, are the state of the art for the enhancement of natural images. Even if they usually show high performance in terms of accuracy, they often suffer from several limitations such as the generation of artifacts and the scalability to high resolutions. Moreover, their main drawback is the completely black-box approach that does not allow to provide the final user with any insight about the enhancement processes applied. In this paper we present a path planning algorithm which provides a step-by-step explanation of the output produced by state of the art enhancement methods. This algorithm, called eXIE, uses a variant of A(*) to emulate the enhancement process of another method through the application of an equivalent sequence of enhancing operators. We applied eXIE to explain the output of several state-of-the-art models trained on the Five-K dataset, obtaining sequences of enhancing operators able to produce very similar results in terms of performance and overcoming the huge limitation of poor interpretability of the best performing algorithms.