LIME: A Method for Low-light IMage Enhancement
This addresses low visibility in images for computer vision applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing enhancement techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of low-light image enhancement by proposing LIME, a method that estimates and refines illumination maps to improve image visibility, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in experiments on real-world images.
When one captures images in low-light conditions, the images often suffer from low visibility. This poor quality may significantly degrade the performance of many computer vision and multimedia algorithms that are primarily designed for high-quality inputs. In this paper, we propose a very simple and effective method, named as LIME, to enhance low-light images. More concretely, the illumination of each pixel is first estimated individually by finding the maximum value in R, G and B channels. Further, we refine the initial illumination map by imposing a structure prior on it, as the final illumination map. Having the well-constructed illumination map, the enhancement can be achieved accordingly. Experiments on a number of challenging real-world low-light images are present to reveal the efficacy of our LIME and show its superiority over several state-of-the-arts.