Low-Light Image Enhancement via the Absorption Light Scattering Model

Low light often leads to poor image visibility, which can easily affect the performance of computer vision algorithms. First, this paper proposes the absorption light scattering model (ALSM), which can be used to reasonably explain the absorbed light imaging process for low-light images. In addition, the absorbing light scattering image obtained via ALSM under a sufficient and uniform illumination can reproduce hidden outlines and details from the low-light image. Then, we identify that the minimum channel of ALSM obtained above exhibits high local similarity. This similarity can be constrained by superpixels, which effectively prevent the use of gradient operations at the edges so that the noise is not amplified quickly during enhancement. Finally, by analyzing the monotonicity between the scene reflection and the atmospheric light or transmittance in ALSM, a new low-light image enhancement method is identified. We replace atmospheric light with inverted atmospheric light to reduce the contribution of atmospheric light in the imaging results. Moreover, a soft jointed mean-standard-deviation (MSD) mechanism is proposed that directly acts on the patches represented by the superpixels. The MSD can obtain a smaller transmittance than that obtained by the minimum strategy, and it can be automatically adjusted according to the information of the image. The experiments on challenging low-light images are conducted to reveal the advantages of our method compared with other powerful techniques.