Better Than Reference in Low-Light Image Enhancement: Conditional Re-Enhancement Network

Low-light images suffer from severe noise, low brightness, low contrast, etc. In previous researches, many image enhancement methods have been proposed, but few methods can deal with these problems simultaneously. In this paper, to solve these problems simultaneously, we propose a low-light image enhancement method that can be combined with supervised learning and previous HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) or Retinex model-based image enhancement methods. First, we analyse the relationship between the HSV color space and the Retinex theory, and show that the V channel (V channel in HSV color space, equals the maximum channel in RGB color space) of the enhanced image can well represent the contrast and brightness enhancement process. Then, a data-driven conditional re-enhancement network (denoted as CRENet) is proposed. The network takes low-light images as input and the enhanced V channel (V channel of the enhanced image) as a condition during testing, and then it can re-enhance the contrast and brightness of the low-light image and at the same time reduce noise and color distortion. In addition, it takes 23 ms to process a color image with the resolution 400*600 on a 1080Ti GPU. Finally, some comparative experiments are implemented to prove the effectiveness of the method. The results show that the method proposed in this paper can significantly improve the quality of the enhanced image, and by combining it with other image contrast enhancement methods, the final enhancement result can even be better than the reference image in contrast and brightness when the contrast and brightness of the reference are not good.