Low Light Image Enhancement for Dark Images

摘要

Image plays an important role in this present technological world and leads to progress in multimedia communication, various research fields related to image processing, etc. Low-light image enhancement specifically addresses images captured in low-light conditions such as nighttime, where the common goal is to brighten and improve the contrast of the image for better visual quality and show details that are hidden in darkness. Research fields that may assist us in lowlight 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. To improve image quality, these low-light images are needed to be enhanced. For this purpose, an exclusively dark dataset comprising of images captured in visible light only is proposed. Further, dehazing technique is used for haze removal, histogram equalization (HE) technique is used for contrast enhancement and denoising technique is used for noise removal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a good performance in low light image enhancement and outperforms state-of-the-art ones in terms of contrast enhancement and noise reduction.