A Variational Model for Nonuniform Low-Light Image Enhancement

SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 1-30, March 2024.
Abstract. Low-light image enhancement plays an important role in computer vision applications, which is a fundamental low-level task and can affect high-level computer vision tasks. To solve this ill-posed problem, a lot of methods have been proposed to enhance low-light images. However, their performance degrades significantly under nonuniform lighting conditions. Due to the rapid variation of illuminance in different regions in natural images, it is challenging to enhance low-light parts and retain normal-light parts simultaneously in the same image. Commonly, either the low-light parts are underenhanced or the normal-light parts are overenhanced, accompanied by color distortion and artifacts. To overcome this problem, we propose a simple and effective Retinex-based model with reflectance map reweighting for images under nonuniform lighting conditions. An alternating proximal gradient (APG) algorithm is proposed to solve the proposed model, in which the illumination map, the reflectance map, and the weighting map are updated iteratively. To make our model applicable to a wide range of light conditions, we design an initialization scheme for the weighting map. A theoretical analysis of the existence of the solution to our model and the convergence of the APG algorithm are also established. A series of experiments on real-world low-light images are conducted, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.