Khái niệm cốt lõi
The core message of this paper is to propose a new Digital-Imaging Retinex theory (DI-Retinex) that takes into account various factors affecting the validity of classic Retinex theory in digital imaging, such as noise, quantization error, non-linearity, and dynamic range overflow. Based on the DI-Retinex theory, the authors derive an efficient low-light image enhancement model that outperforms existing unsupervised methods.
Tóm tắt
The paper starts by analyzing the limitations of applying the classic Retinex theory directly to digital imaging. It identifies four key factors that affect the validity of Retinex theory in digital imaging:
- Noise: Various sources of noise, such as read noise, dark current noise, and photon shot noise, are introduced during the digital imaging process.
- Quantization error: The analog-to-digital conversion process introduces quantization error due to the discrete representation of continuous intensity values.
- Non-linearity: The camera response function, commonly modeled by a Gamma transformation, introduces non-linearity in the imaging process.
- Dynamic range overflow: The limited dynamic range of imaging devices can lead to clipping of pixel values.
The paper then proposes a new expression called Digital-Imaging Retinex theory (DI-Retinex) that incorporates these factors. The DI-Retinex theory shows the existence of an offset term with a non-zero mean and an amplified variance, which is not captured by the classic Retinex theory.
Based on the DI-Retinex theory, the authors derive an efficient low-light image enhancement model that predicts pixel-wise contrast and brightness adjustment coefficients using a lightweight network. The network is trained in a zero-shot learning manner, without requiring paired or unpaired training data, using a masked reverse degradation loss and a variance suppression loss.
Extensive experiments on the LOL-v1, LOL-v2, and DARKFACE datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing unsupervised low-light enhancement methods in terms of visual quality, objective metrics, model size, and inference speed. The method also shows significant performance gains when used as a preprocessing step for downstream face detection tasks in low-light conditions.
Thống kê
The scene radiance reaching the imaging device is the product of illuminance and reflectance, plus noise: I = L ⊙ R + ϵ.
The camera response function can be modeled by a Gamma transformation: G(I) = μ + λIγ.
The quantization error can be expressed as a uniform distribution: δi,j ∼ U(−q/2, q/2).
Dynamic range overflow can be represented by a masked offset matrix: Ck0(I) = I + ΔI.
Trích dẫn
"Many existing methods for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) based on Retinex theory ignore important factors that affect the validity of this theory in digital imaging, such as noise, quantization error, non-linearity, and dynamic range overflow."
"Our new expression includes an offset term in the enhancement model, which allows for pixel-wise brightness contrast adjustment with a non-linear mapping function."