Enhancing low-light color images using an RGB-NIR single sensor

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to enhance the color image of a low-light scene by using a single sensor that simultaneously captures red, green, blue (RGB) and near-infrared (NIR) information. Typical image enhancement methods require two cameras to simultaneously capture color and NIR images. In such cases, meticulous calibration is required to adjust the pixel positions of the two cameras. By contrast, our proposed system is calibration free, but achieves accurate color image restoration. We divide the captured multi-spectral data into RGB and NIR information based on the spectral sensitivity of our imaging system. Using the NIR information for guidance, we reconstruct the corresponding clear color image based on a joint demosaicking and denoising technique. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our method using raw data captured by our imaging system.