Low-Light Image Enhancement with Semi-Decoupled Decomposition

MATLAB implementation of the algorithm in the paper "Low-Light Image Enhancement with Semi-Decoupled Decomposition". IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MULTIMEDIA.

1 Introduction

Low-light image enhancement is important for highquality image display and other visual applications. It is a non-trivial task, as the enhancement is expected to improve the visibility of an image, while keep its visual naturalness. Despite that Retinex-based methods have been recognized as a representative technique for this task, they still have some limitations. First, various artifacts can still be introduced into some enhanced results. Second, although many kinds of priori information can be used to solve the first issue, it requires to carefully model priori into the regularization item, and tends to make the optimization process more complex. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Total Variation, and use it as the regularization term to build our Retinex decomposition model, which gradually refines the decomposed layers in a semi-decoupled way. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on several public datasets were conducted to evaluate our method. The results demonstrate that our method produces images with higher visibility and acceptable visual quality simultaneously, which outperforms other state-of-the-art low-light enhancement methods in terms of several objective and subjective evaluation metric.

2 Demo

Image 1-7 were downloaded from the Internet, and 8-10 were taken in the authors' campus.

• Image 1

• Image 2

• Image 3

• Image 4

• Image 5

• Image 6

• Image 7

• Image 8

• Image 9

• Image 10

3 Acknowledgments

• Part of our code architecture is inspired by "A Joint Intrinsic-Extrinsic Prior Model for Retinex "[code, paper].

Please consider to cite this paper if you find this code helpful for your research：

@ARTICLE{8970535,
        author={Hao, Shijie and Han, Xu and Guo, Yanrong and Xu, Xin and Wang, Meng},
        journal={IEEE Transactions on Multimedia}, 
        title={Low-Light Image Enhancement With Semi-Decoupled Decomposition}, 
        year={2020},
        volume={22},
        number={12},
        pages={3025-3038},
        doi={10.1109/TMM.2020.2969790}
       }