Low-Light Image Enhancement Network Based on Multi-Scale Feature Complementation

Abstract

Images captured in low-light environments have problems of insufficient brightness and low contrast, which will affect subsequent image processing tasks. Although most current enhancement methods can obtain high-contrast images, they still suffer from noise amplification and color distortion. To address these issues, this paper proposes a low-light image enhancement network based on multi-scale feature comple-mentation (LIEN-MFC), which is a U-shaped encoder-decoder network supervised by multiple images of different scales. In the encoder, four feature extraction branches are constructed to extract features of low-light images at differ-ent scales. In the decoder, to ensure the integrity of the learned features at each scale, a feature supplementary fu-sion module (FSFM) is proposed to complement and inte-grate features from different branches of the encoder and decoder. In addition, a feature restoration module (FRM) and an image reconstruction module (IRM) are built in each branch to reconstruct the restored features and output en-hanced images. To better train the network, a joint loss function is defined, in which a discriminative loss term is designed to ensure that the enhanced results better meet the visual properties of the human eye. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method out-performs some state-of-the-art methods subjectively and ob-jectively.