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ChebyLighter: Optimal Curve Estimation for Low-light Image Enhancement

Published: 10 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Low-light enhancement aims to recover a high contrast normal light image from a low-light image with bad exposure and low contrast. Inspired by curve adjustment in photo editing software and Chebyshev approximation, this paper presents a novel model for brightening low-light images. The proposed model, ChebyLighter, learns to estimate pixel-wise adjustment curves for a low-light image recurrently to reconstruct an enhanced output. In ChebyLighter, Chebyshev image series are first generated. Then pixel-wise coefficient matrices are estimated with Triple Coefficient Estimation (TCE) modules and the final enhanced image is recurrently reconstructed by Chebyshev Attention Weighted Summation (CAWS). The TCE module is specifically designed based on dual attention mechanism with three necessary inputs. Our method can achieve ideal performance because adjustment curves can be obtained with numerical approximation by our model. With extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on diverse test images, we demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement algorithms.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    MM '22: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia
    October 2022
    7537 pages
    ISBN:9781450392037
    DOI:10.1145/3503161
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 10 October 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. adjustment curve
    2. chebyshev approximation
    3. image enhancement
    4. low-light

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    • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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    • (2025)Reffusion: Enhancement Conditional Diffusion Framework with Dual Domain Interaction Transformer for image restorationKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2025.112998311(112998)Online publication date: Feb-2025
    • (2025)Illuminating the Night: A Light Source-Aware and Exposure-Balanced Low-Light Enhancement Approach for Real Nighttime ScenesDigital Signal Processing10.1016/j.dsp.2025.104999(104999)Online publication date: Jan-2025
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    • (2024)Illumination Distribution Prior for Low-light Image EnhancementProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681127(9116-9125)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
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