Abstract Low-light is an inescapable element of our daily surroundings that greatly affects the efficiency of our vision. Research works on low-light imagery have seen a steady growth, particularly in the field of image enhancement, but there is still a lack of a go-to database as a benchmark. Besides, research fields that may assist us in low-light environments, such as object detection, has glossed over this aspect even though breakthroughs-after-breakthroughs had been achieved in recent years, most noticeably from the lack of low-light data (less than 2 of the total images) in successful public benchmark datasets such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, and Microsoft COCO. Thus, we propose the Exclusively Dark dataset to elevate this data drought. It consists exclusively of low-light images captured in visible light only, with image and object level annotations. Moreover, we share insightful findings in regards to the effects of low-light on the object detection task by analyzing the visualizations of both hand-crafted and learned features. We found that the effects of low-light reach far deeper into the features than can be solved by simple “illumination invariance”. It is our hope that this analysis and the Exclusively Dark dataset can encourage the growth in low-light domain researches on different fields. The dataset can be downloaded at https: github.com cs-chan Exclusively-Dark-Image-Dataset .
The datasets used to benchmark enhancement works are commonly taken from data used for quality evaluation, but not necessarily a standard that is widely used in the low-light domain, such as the IVC database ( @cite_31 ) that were collected for other image enhancement works instead of low-light enhancement. The images were synthetically darkened to simulate low-light so that the original image can be used as a groundtruth for comparison ( @cite_28 @cite_53 ). There are also those who proposed datasets for enhancement but the amount is low, with less than 100 images ( @cite_18 ) which is common for image quality works. Whereas some chose to combine datasets to obtain a larger variety for benchmarking ( @cite_38 @cite_37 ). It is also not uncommon to capture or download low-light images for qualitative assessments ( @cite_42 @cite_43 @cite_24 @cite_12 ). Essentially, the datasets used are highly inconsistent.
@cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_37 @cite_28 @cite_53 @cite_42 @cite_24 @cite_43 @cite_31 @cite_12
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We propose a weighted variational model to estimate both the reflectance and the illumination from an observed image. We show that, though it is widely adopted for ease of modeling, the log-transformed image for this task is not ideal. Based on the previous investigation of the logarithmic transformation, a new weighted variational model is proposed for better prior representation, which is imposed in the regularization terms. Different from conventional variational models, the proposed model can preserve the estimated reflectance with more details. Moreover, the proposed model can suppress noise to some extent. An alternating minimization scheme is adopted to solve the proposed model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model with its algorithm. Compared with other variational methods, the proposed method yields comparable or better results on both subjective and objective assessments. Image enhancement plays an important role in image processing and analysis. Among various enhancement algorithms, Retinex-based algorithms can efficiently enhance details and have been widely adopted. Since Retinex-based algorithms regard illumination removal as a default preference and fail to limit the range of reflectance, the naturalness of non-uniform illumination images cannot be effectively preserved. However, naturalness is essential for image enhancement to achieve pleasing perceptual quality. In order to preserve naturalness while enhancing details, we propose an enhancement algorithm for non-uniform illumination images. In general, this paper makes the following three major contributions. First, a lightness-order-error measure is proposed to access naturalness preservation objectively. Second, a bright-pass filter is proposed to decompose an image into reflectance and illumination, which, respectively, determine the details and the naturalness of the image. Third, we propose a bi-log transformation, which is utilized to map the illumination to make a balance between details and naturalness. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can not only enhance the details but also preserve the naturalness for non-uniform illumination images. Abstract In low light condition, low dynamic range of the captured image distorts the contrast and results in high noise levels. In this paper, we propose an effective contrast enhancement method based on dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) which operates on a wide range of imagery without noise amplification. In terms of enhancement, we employ a logarithmic function for global brightness enhancement based on the nonlinear response of human vision to luminance. Moreover, we enhance the local contrast by contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) in low-pass subbands to make image structure clearer. In terms of noise reduction, based on the direction selective property of DT-CWT, we perform content-based total variation (TV) diffusion which controls the smoothing degree according to noise and edges in high-pass subbands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a good performance in low light image enhancment and outperforms state-of-the-art ones in terms of contrast enhancement and noise reduction. Abstract In surveillance, monitoring and tactical reconnaissance, gathering visual information from a dynamic environment and accurately processing such data are essential to making informed decisions and ensuring the success of a mission. Camera sensors are often cost-limited to capture clear images or videos taken in a poorly-lit environment. Many applications aim to enhance brightness, contrast and reduce noise content from the images in an on-board real-time manner. We propose a deep autoencoder-based approach to identify signal features from low-light images and adaptively brighten images without over-amplifying saturating the lighter parts in images with a high dynamic range. We show that a variant of the stacked-sparse denoising autoencoder can learn from synthetically darkened and noise-added training examples to adaptively enhance images taken from natural low-light environment and or are hardware-degraded. Results show significant credibility of the approach both visually and by quantitative comparison with various techniques. This paper proposes an efficient method to modify histograms and enhance contrast in digital images. Enhancement plays a significant role in digital image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition. We present an automatic transformation technique that improves the brightness of dimmed images via the gamma correction and probability distribution of luminance pixels. To enhance video, the proposed image-enhancement method uses temporal information regarding the differences between each frame to reduce computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces enhanced images of comparable or higher quality than those produced using previous state-of-the-art methods. We propose a straightforward and efficient fusion-based method for enhancing weakly illumination images that uses several mature image processing techniques. First, we employ an illumination estimating algorithm based on morphological closing to decompose an observed image into a reflectance image and an illumination image. We then derive two inputs that represent luminance-improved and contrast-enhanced versions of the first decomposed illumination using the sigmoid function and adaptive histogram equalization. Designing two weights based on these inputs, we produce an adjusted illumination by fusing the derived inputs with the corresponding weights in a multi-scale fashion. Through a proper weighting and fusion strategy, we blend the advantages of different techniques to produce the adjusted illumination. The final enhanced image is obtained by compensating the adjusted illumination back to the reflectance. Through this synthesis, the enhanced image represents a trade-off among detail enhancement, local contrast improvement and preserving the natural feel of the image. In the proposed fusion-based framework, images under different weak illumination conditions such as backlighting, non-uniform illumination and nighttime can be enhanced. HighlightsA fusion-based method for enhancing various weakly illuminated images is proposed.The proposed method requires only one input to obtain the enhanced image.Different mature image processing techniques can be blended in our framework.Our method has an efficient computation time for practical applications. When one captures images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility. Besides degrading the visual aesthetics of images, this poor quality may also significantly degenerate the performance of many computer vision and multimedia algorithms that are primarily designed for high-quality inputs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective low-light image enhancement (LIME) method. More concretely, the illumination of each pixel is first estimated individually by finding the maximum value in R, G, and B channels. Furthermore, we refine the initial illumination map by imposing a structure prior on it, as the final illumination map. Having the well-constructed illumination map, the enhancement can be achieved accordingly. Experiments on a number of challenging low-light images are present to reveal the efficacy of our LIME and show its superiority over several state-of-the-arts in terms of enhancement quality and efficiency.