Low-Light Image Enhancement via Self-Reinforced Retinex Projection Model

Low-light image enhancement aims to improve the quality of images captured under low-lightening conditions, which is a fundamental problem in computer vision and multimedia areas. Although many efforts have been invested over the years, existing illumination-based models tend to generate unnatural-looking results (e.g., over-exposure). It is because that the widely-adopted illumination adjustment (e.g., Gamma Correction) breaks down the favorable smoothness property of the original illumination derived from the well-designed illumination estimation model. To settle this issue, a great-efficiency and high-quality Self-Reinforced Retinex Projection (SRRP) model is developed in this paper, which contains optimization modules of both illumination and reflectance layers. Specifically, we construct a new fidelity term with the self-reinforced function for the illumination optimization to eliminate the dependence of the illumination adjustment to obtain a desired illumination with the excellent smoothing property. By introducing a flexible feasible constraint, we obtain a reflectance optimization module with projection. Owing to its flexibility, we can extend our model to an enhanced version by integrating a data-driven denoising mechanism as the projection, which is able to effectively handle the generated noises/artifacts in the enhanced procedure. In the experimental part, on one side, we make ample comparative assessments on multiple benchmarks with considerable state-of-the-art methods. These evaluations fully verify the outstanding performance of our method, in terms of the qualitative and quantitative analyses and execution efficiency. On the other side, we also conduct extensive analytical experiments to indicate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed model.