End-to-end adaptive object detection with learnable Retinex for low-light city environment

ABSTRACTIn the smart city context, efficient urban surveillance under low-light conditions is crucial. Accurate object detection in dimly lit areas is vital for safety and nighttime driving. However, subpar, poorly lit images due to environmental or equipment limitations pose a challenge, affecting precision in tasks like object detection and segmentation. Existing solutions often involve time-consuming, inefficient image preprocessing and lack strong theoretical support for low-light city image enhancement. To address these issue, we propose an end-to-end pipeline named LAR-YOLO that leverages convolutional network to extract a set of image transformation parameters, and implements the Retinex theory to proficiently elevate the quality of the image. Unlike conventional approaches, this innovative method eliminates the need for hand-crafted parameters and can adaptively enhance each low-light image. Additionally, due to a restricted quantity of training data, the detection model may not achieve an adequate level of expertise to enhance detection accuracy. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a cross-domain learning approach that supplements the low-light model with knowledge from normal light scenarios. Our proof-of-principle experiments and ablation studies utilising ExDark and VOC datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms similar low-light object detection algorithms by approximately 13% in terms of accuracy.KEYWORDS: Object detectionsmart cityRetinex theorylow-light image processingcross-domain learning AcknowledgmentsThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 62272462 and 51904294.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51904294]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [62272462].