Low-light color image enhancement via iterative noise reduction using RGB/NIR sensor

Abstract

We propose a method to enhance the color image of a low-light scene using a single sensor that simultaneously captures red, green, blue (RGB), and near-infrared (NIR) information. Typical image enhancement methods require two sensors to simultaneously capture color and NIR images. In contrast, our proposed system utilizes a single sensor but achieves accurate color image restoration. We divide the captured multispectral 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 color image based on a joint demosaicking and denoising technique. Subsequently, we restore the estimated color image iteratively using the constructed guidance image. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using synthetic data, and real raw data captured by our imaging system.