DALE : Dark Region-Aware Low-light Image Enhancement
This addresses the problem of improving image quality in low-light conditions for applications like photography or surveillance, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing enhancement techniques.
The paper tackles low-light image enhancement by accurately recognizing dark regions with a visual attention module and intensively enhancing their brightness, resulting in qualitative and quantitative outperformance over state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we present a novel low-light image enhancement method called dark region-aware low-light image enhancement (DALE), where dark regions are accurately recognized by the proposed visual attention module and their brightness are intensively enhanced. Our method can estimate the visual attention in an efficient manner using super-pixels without any complicated process. Thus, the method can preserve the color, tone, and brightness of original images and prevents normally illuminated areas of the images from being saturated and distorted. Experimental results show that our method accurately identifies dark regions via the proposed visual attention, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods.