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Low-light Image Enhancement via Breaking Down the Darkness

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Abstract

Images captured in low-light environments often suffer from complex degradation. Simply adjusting light would inevitably result in burst of hidden noise and color distortion. To seek results with satisfied lighting, cleanliness, and realism from degraded inputs, this paper presents a novel framework inspired by the divide-and-rule principle, greatly alleviating the degradation entanglement. Assuming that an image can be decomposed into texture (with possible noise) and color components, one can specifically execute noise removal and color correction along with light adjustment. For this purpose, we propose to convert an image from the RGB colorspace into a luminance-chrominance one. An adjustable noise suppression network is designed to eliminate noise in the brightened luminance, having the illumination map estimated to indicate noise amplification levels. The enhanced luminance further serves as guidance for the chrominance mapper to generate realistic colors. Extensive experiments are conducted to reveal the effectiveness of our design, and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively on several benchmark datasets. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/mingcv/Bread.

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Notes

  1. https://sites.google.com/site/vonikakis/datasets.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their effort in handling our submission, as well as the comments and suggestions that improve the quality of this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 62072327.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, China

    Xiaojie Guo & Qiming Hu

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  1. Xiaojie Guo
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  2. Qiming Hu
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Correspondence to Xiaojie Guo.

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Communicated by Yu Li.

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Guo, X., Hu, Q. Low-light Image Enhancement via Breaking Down the Darkness. Int J Comput Vis 131, 48–66 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-022-01667-9

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