Detail-preserving noise suppression post-processing for low-light image enhancement

Abstract

Low-light image enhancement is a challenging task for high-quality image display and visual applications. However, most of the existing methods are difficult to effectively improve brightness and suppress noise. To solve the problem of greatly amplifying noise in many low-light image enhancement methods, this paper presents a detail-preserving noise-suppressing post-processing method for low-light image enhancement. The main idea is that Gamma correction has good performance in noise suppression, by extending the single global parameter of Gamma correction to a Gamma correction map with the same size as the low-light image, we propose an improved domain transform recursive filter to optimize Gamma correction maps, aiming to smooth the Gamma correction map while preserving structural edges, thereby achieving the goal of suppressing noise levels in the enhanced image and preserving the details and contrast of the enhanced image. The proposed post-processing approach addresses the concern of enhancing noise when enhancing low-light images, and the results show that the proposed post-processing method has good detail preservation and noise suppression performance for different advanced low-light image enhancement methods.