LightNet: Generative Model for Enhancement of Low-Light Images

Chaitra Desai, Nikhil Akalwadi, Amogh Joshi, Sampada Malagi, Chinmayee Mandi, Ramesh Ashok Tabib, Ujwala Patil, Uma Mudenagudi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2023, pp. 2231-2240

In this work, we propose a generative model for enhancement of images captured in low-light conditions. Sensor constraints and inappropriate lighting conditions are accountable for degradations introduced in the image. The degradations limit the visibility of the scene and impedes vision in applications like detection, tracking and surveillance. Recently, deep learning algorithms have taken a leap for enhancement of images captured in low-light conditions. However, these algorithms fail to capture information on fine grained local structures and limit the performance. Towards this, we propose a generative model for enhancement of low-lit images to exploit both local and global information, and term it as LightNet. In proposed architecture LightNet, we include a hierarchical generator encompassing encoder-decoder module to capture global information and a patch discriminator to capture fine grained local information. Typically, the encoder-decoder module downsamples the low-lit image into distinct scales. Learning at distinct scales helps to capture both local and global features thereby suppressing the unwanted features (noise, blur). With this motivation, we downsample the captured low-lit image into 3 distinct scales. The decoder upsamples the encoded features at respective scales to generate an enhanced image. We demonstrate the results of proposed methodology on custom and benchmark datasets in comparison with SOTA methods using appropriate quantitative metrics.