Global attention retinex network for low light image enhancement

Abstract

Most low-light image enhancement methods only adjust the brightness, contrast and noise reduction of low-light images, making it difficult to recover the lost information in darker areas of the image, and even cause color distortion and blurring. To solve the above problems, a global attention-based Retinex network (GARN) for low-light image enhancement is proposed in this paper. We propose a novel global attention module which computes multiple dimensional information in the channel attention module to help facilitate inference learning. Then the global attention module is embedded into different layers of the network to extract richer shallow texture features and deep semantic features. This means that the rich features are more conducive to learning the mapping relationship between low-light images to normal-light images, so that the detail recovery of dark regions is enhanced in low-light images. We also collected a low/normal light image dataset with multiple scenes, in which the images paired as training set can succeed to be applied to low-light image enhancement under different lighting conditions. Experimental results on publicly available datasets show that our method has better effectiveness and generality than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of evaluations metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, NIQE, Entropy.