Low-Light Image Enhancement Using a Simple Network Structure

Under low-light conditions, captured images can be affected by unsatisfactory lighting conditions. Low-light image enhancement called LLIE is a digital image processing to obtain natural normal-light images from the low-light image. LLIE includes three main tasks: reducing noise and artifacts, preserving edges and textures, and reproducing natural brightness and color. In recent years, many types of research have focused on deep-learning-based approaches that can achieve excellent performance. However, one primary problem with these methods is that inference time is long owing to complex network structures. To solve the trade-off between the performance and implementation time, we propose a simple network with effective modules. We utilize a U-Net structure and pre-processing is added to preserve edges and textures. Moreover, we embed Channel Attention to restore color and illumination, Res FFT-ReLU to reduce noise, and Pixel Shuffler to preserve the high-frequency components. According to our experimental results, the proposed method achieves better performance and faster inference time than conventional LLIE methods.