Content-illumination coupling guided low-light image enhancement network

Abstract

Current low-light enhancement algorithms fail to suppress noise when enhancing brightness, and may introduces structural distortion and color distortion caused by halos or artifacts. This paper proposes a content-illumination coupling guided low-light image enhancement network (CICGNet), it develops a truss topology based on Retinex as backbone to decompose low-light image component in an end-to-end way. The preservation of content features and the enhancement of illumination features are carried out along with depth and width direction of the truss topology. Each submodule uses the same resolution input and output to avoid the introduction of noise. Illumination component prevents misestimation of global and local illumination by using pre- and post-activation features at different depth levels, this way could avoid possible halos and artifacts. The network progressively enhances the illumination component and maintains the content component stage-by-stage. The proposed algorithm demonstrates better performance compared with advanced attention-based low-light enhancement algorithms and state-of-the-art image restoration algorithms. We also perform extensive ablation studies and demonstrate the impact of low-light enhancement algorithm on the downstream task of computer vision. Code is available at: https://github.com/Ruini94/CICGNet.