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Low-light Image Enhancement via Dual Reflectance Estimation

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Abstract

Improving the quality of low-light images is a fundamental task with vast applications in computer vision. Retinex-based methods which decompose the images into reflectance and illumination components have been actively studied over the past years. In this paper, we propose a Retinex-based method with dual reflectance estimation. To be precise, we start with a simple reflectance estimation based on the HSV color space, which is then accompanied by another variational-based estimation of both the reflectance and illumination. Finally, we bring a new perspective to the Retinex model by reconstructing the normal-light image with a novel transformation map given by the estimated reflectance and illumination, which we call radiance mapping. Extensive experiments show that our method obtains outstanding results, both numerically and visually, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the link https://daooshee.github.io/BMVC2018website/, and https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lp6m5JE3kf3M66Dicbx5wSnvhxt90V4T.

Notes

  1. https://daooshee.github.io/BMVC2018website/

  2. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1lp6m5JE3kf3M66Dicbx5wSnvhxt90V4T

  3. https://github.com/b1sakher/Contrast-enhancement-in-digital-images

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Key R &D Program of China under Grant 2021YFE0203700, and Grant ITF MHP/038/20.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Fan Jia, Tiange Wang & Tieyong Zeng

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  1. Fan Jia
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  2. Tiange Wang
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  3. Tieyong Zeng
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by FJ, TW. The first draft of the manuscript was written by TW, FJ, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tieyong Zeng.

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Jia, F., Wang, T. & Zeng, T. Low-light Image Enhancement via Dual Reflectance Estimation. J Sci Comput 98, 36 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10915-023-02431-y

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