Edge Computing Driven Low-Light Image Dynamic Enhancement for Object Detection

Abstract

We focus on performing object detection in images taken under low-light conditions, which is critical task and often occurs in mobile multimedia computing environment. Unlike former methods to obtain enhanced images before detection with variant kinds of manually designed filters, we propose an edge computing and multi-task driven framework to complete tasks of image enhancement and object detection with fast response. The proposed framework consists of two stages, namely cloud-based enhancement stage and edge-based detection stage. In cloud-based enhancement stage, we establish connection between mobile users and cloud servers to input rescaled and small-size illumination parts of lowlight images, where enhancement subnetworks are dynamically combined to output several enhanced illumination parts and corresponding weights based on low-light context of input images. During edge-based detection stage, cloud-computed weights offers informativeness information on extracted feature maps to enhance their representation abilities, which results in accurate predictions on labels and positions for objects. By applying the proposed framework in cloud computing system, experimental results show it significantly improves detection performance in mobile multimedia and low-light environment.