Non-Local Retinex Based Dehazing and Low Light Enhancement of Images

Abstract

We know that a vast amount of research has recently been done on dehazing single images. More work is done on day-time images than night-time images. Also, enhancement of low light images is another area in which lots of research going on. In this paper, a simple yet effective unified variational model is proposed for dehazing of day and night images and low-light enhancement based on non-local global variational regularization. Given the relation between image dehazing and retinex, the haze removal process can minimize a variational retinex model. Estimating of ambient light and transmission maps is a key step in modern dehazing methods. Atmospheric light is not uniform and constant for hazy night images, as night scenes often contain multiple light sources. Often lit and non-illuminated regions have different colour characteristics and cause total variation colour distortion and halo artifacts. Our work directly implements a non-local retinal model based on the L2 norm that simulates the average activity of inhibitory and excitatory neuronal populations in the cortex to overcome this problem. This potential biological feasibility of the L2 norm of our work is divided into two parts using a filtered gradient approach, the reflection sparse prior and the reflection gradient fidelity before the observed image gradient. This unified framework of NLTV-Retinex and DCP efficiently performs low-light enhancement and dehazing of day and night images. We show results obtained using our method on daytime and night-time images and a low-light image dataset. We quantitatively and qualitatively compare our results with recently reported methods, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.