Low-light Image Enhancement Using the Cell Vibration Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel low-light image enhancement method based on an energy model inspired by membrane vibrations, combined with gamma correction and local fusion, outperforming existing techniques in quality and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new energy model for lightness enhancement, integrating membrane vibration analysis with gamma correction and local fusion, offering improved performance over prior methods.

Findings

Outperforms nine state-of-the-art methods in avoiding color distortion

Restores textures of dark areas effectively

Reduces time cost of image enhancement

Abstract

Low light very likely leads to the degradation of an image's quality and even causes visual task failures. Existing image enhancement technologies are prone to overenhancement, color distortion or time consumption, and their adaptability is fairly limited. Therefore, we propose a new single low-light image lightness enhancement method. First, an energy model is presented based on the analysis of membrane vibrations induced by photon stimulations. Then, based on the unique mathematical properties of the energy model and combined with the gamma correction model, a new global lightness enhancement model is proposed. Furthermore, a special relationship between image lightness and gamma intensity is found. Finally, a local fusion strategy, including segmentation, filtering and fusion, is proposed to optimize the local details of the global lightness enhancement images. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to nine state-of-the-art methods in avoiding color distortion, restoring the textures of dark areas, reproducing natural colors and reducing time cost. The image source and code will be released at https://github.com/leixiaozhou/CDEFmethod.