Efficient Image Enhancement Model for Correcting Uneven Illumination Images

Images captured under varying light conditions have deficient contrast, low brightness, latent colors, and high noise. Numerous methods have been developed for image enhancement. However, these methods are only suitable for enhancing specific type of images (e.g., over-exposed or underexposed), and also fail to restore artifact-free results for various other types of images. Therefore, to meet this goal, in this paper, we present an automatic image enhancement method, which is capable of producing quality results for all types of images captured under uneven exposure conditions (e.g., backlit, non-uniform, over-exposed, one-sided illumination and night-time images). Firstly, images are categorized using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to determine their class, and different values of weight coefficients are achieved for further processing. Then, images are converted into photonegative form to obtain an initial transmission map using a bright channel prior. Next, L1-norm regularization is adopted to refine scene transmission. Besides, environmental light is estimated based on an effective filter. Finally, the image degradation model is applied to achieve enhanced results. Furthermore, post-processing of the images is comprised of two steps, such as denoising and details enhancement. The denoised model is only applied when the images are captured in extreme low-light conditions. Whereas, a smooth layer is obtained using L1-norm regularization to enhance details in partially over-and under-exposed images. Extensive experiments reveal the effectives of the proposed approach as compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms.