Low-Light Image Enhancement Method Using a Modified Gamma Transform and Gamma Filtering-Based Histogram Specification for Convex Combination Coefficients

Recently, a lot of low-light image enhancement methods have been proposed. However, these methods have some problems such as causing fine details lost in bright regions and/or unnatural color tones. In this paper, we propose a new low-light image enhancement method to cope with these problems. In the proposed method, a pixel is represented by a convex combination of white, black, and pure color. Then, an equi-hue plane in RGB color space is represented as a triangle whose vertices correspond to white, black, and pure color. The visibility of low-light image is improved by applying a modified gamma transform to the combination coefficients on an equi-hue plane in RGB color space. The contrast of the image is enhanced by the histogram specification method using the histogram smoothed by a filter with a kernel determined based on a gamma distribution. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the comparison with the state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement methods.