Target Detection in Underground Mines Based on Low-Light Image Enhancement

Underground mines’ complex environments with dim lighting and high dust and humidity hamper feature extraction and reduce detection accuracy. To address this, we propose a low-light image enhancement-based target detection algorithm. Firstly, LIENet enhances low-light image quality and brightness via a dual-gamma curve and non-reference loss function-guided iterations. Secondly, the hierarchical feature extraction (HFE) method with a dual-branch structure captures long-term and local correlations, focusing on critical corner regions. Finally, HFE is combined with a feature pyramid structure for comprehensive feature representation through a top-down global adjustment. Our method, validated on a self-built dataset, outperforms other algorithms with an mAP@0.5 of 96.96% and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 71.1%, proving excellent low-light detection performance in mines.