An Efficient Method for Real-Time Image Exposure Correction

Exposure errors in images, including both underexposure and overexposure, significantly diminish images’ contrast and visual appeal. Existing deep learning-based exposure correction methods either require large networks or longer processing time for inference and are thus not applicable for embedded devices and real-time applications. To address these issues, a lightweight network is proposed in this paper to correct exposure errors with limited memory occupation and inference steps. It adopts the Laplacian pyramid to incrementally recover the color and details of the image through a layer-by-layer procedure. A structural re-parameterization structure is designed to both reduce model size for inference speed up and improve performance with a multi-branch learning structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a better performance-efficiency trade-off than other exposure correction methods.