Capturing color and near-infrared images with different exposure times for image enhancement under extremely low-light scene

Abstract

Noise and blur are annoying, common problems in low-light photography. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to reconstruct a blur and noise-free color image sequence using near-infrared (NIR) images. In extremely low light, previous works may fail in color image restoration because both heavy noise and motion blur are produced simultaneously. To overcome these essential problems, we augment both the imaging system and image synthesis method. Our imaging system captures the color and NIR images with different exposure times. Capturing color image with a long exposure time allows us to mitigate the heavy noise. In contrast, the NIR images are taken with a short exposure time to measure the structure of the scene. By leveraging the captured image pairs, we reconstruct a latent color image sequence using a scale map and color correlation. Our experiments on actual images show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods under extremely low-light condition.