Unsupervised low-light image enhancement by data augmentation and contrastive learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT Today, with the increasing demand for visual perception and high-level computational vision tasks, the field of low-light enhancement is rapidly developing. However, models trained on existing datasets often fail or suffer significant performance degradation in real-world low-light scenarios. This performance degradation is frequently due to the limitations of current databases, which typically contain small quantities of paired images of a single type. This article proposes an unsupervised model with a unique data augmentation technique that transforms a regular image database into a paired image database. By adjusting image parameters during training to change exposure, a regular image database can be converted into a paired one. The model restores low-exposure images by extracting lighting features through comparative learning. Evaluations of the LOL and DIV2K datasets demonstrate the proposed model's effectiveness, achieving notable results in low-light image enhancement. This method removes dataset restrictions, broadening the model's range of applications.