DCTE-LLIE: A Dual Color-and-Texture-Enhancement-Based Method for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Abstract

The enhancement of images captured under low-light conditions plays a vitally important role in the area of image processing and can significantly affect the performance of following operations. In recent years, deep learning techniques have been leveraged in the area of low-light image enhancement tasks, and deep-learning-based low-light image enhancement methods have been the mainstream for low-light image enhancement tasks. However, due to the inability of existing methods to effectively maintain the color distribution of the original input image and to effectively handle feature descriptions at different scales, the final enhanced image exhibits color distortion and local blurring phenomena. So, in this paper, a novel dual color-and-texture-enhancement-based low-light image enhancement method is proposed, which can effectively enhance low-light images. Firstly, a novel color enhancement block is leveraged to help maintain color distribution during the enhancement process, which can further eliminate the color distortion effect; after that, an attention-based multiscale texture enhancement block is proposed to help the network focus on multiscale local regions and extract more reliable texture representations automatically, and a fusion strategy is leveraged to fuse the multiscale feature representations automatically and finally generate the enhanced reflection component. The experimental results on public datasets and real-world low-light images established the effectiveness of the proposed method on low-light image enhancement tasks.