Attention-model Guided Image Enhancement for Robotic Vision Applications

Optical data is one of the crucial information resources for robotic platforms to sense and interact with the environment being employed. Obtained image quality is the main factor of having a successful application of sophisticated methods (e.g., object detection and recognition). In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the image quality by enhancing the lighting and denoising. The proposed method is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) structure. It makes use of the attention model both to guide the enhancement process and to apply denoising simultaneously thanks to the step of adding noise on the input of discriminator networks. Detailed experimental and comparative results using real datasets were presented in order to underline the performance of the proposed method.