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Research Article

Nighttime Low-Light Image Enhancement Method Using Retinex Model Based on Atmospheric Scattered Light Removal

대기 산란광 제거 기반의 레티넥스 모델을 통한 야간 저조도 영상 개선 기법

Do Kyung Shin1, Jae Won Doh2, and Kyu Tae Park3

신도경1, 도재원2, 박규태3

1,2,3Chief Research Engineer, Maritime Surface Sonar Systems, LIG Nex1
1,2,3LIG 넥스원 해양연구소 소나체계개발단 수석연구원
30 September 2022. pp. 73-102
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Abstract
최근 다양한 컴퓨터 비전 분야에서 영상을 이용한 어플리케이션 및 시스템이 활용되고 있다. 시스템에서 영상을 이용한 작업을 수행하기 위해서는 고화질 및 고품질의 영상을 필요로 한다. 하지만 야간이나 저조도 환경 조건에서 획득된 영상은 전체적으로 어둡고 대조비가 낮으며, 가시성이 낮아서 사람의 육안으로 세부 정보를 구분하지 못하는 문제점이 존재한다. 따라서 영상이 활용되는 시스템의 신뢰성을 확보하기 위해서 저조도 영상의 가시성을 높이는 저조도 영상 개선 기술 연구가 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 저조도 영상을 개선하기 위해서 지역 영역의 밝기 대비를 향상하는 레티넥스 알고리즘과 전역 영역의 밝기를 향상하는 대기 산란광 기반의 안개 제거 알고리즘의 혼합 모델을 통해 불균일한 조명 조건에 강인한 적응적인 알고리즘을 제안한다. 제안된 알고리즘의 성능을 평가하기 위해서 ExDark 저조도 영상 데이터 셋을 사용하였으며, 14개의 다양한 기존 방법들과 비교를 수행하였다. 실험 결과 제안한 알고리즘이 기존의 저조도 영상 개선 방법보다 우수한 성능을 보임을 확인하였다.
Recently, applications and systems using images have been used in various computer vision fields. We need high-resolution and high-quality images to work with images in our systems. However, images acquired at night or in low-light conditions are generally dark and have a low contrast ratio. In addition, since the obtained image has low visibility, there is a problem in that detailed information cannot be distinguished by human eyes. Therefore, in order to increase the reliability of the system using the image, there is a need for research on improving the low-light image. In this paper, we propose a robust and adaptive low-light image enhancement algorithm for non-uniform lighting conditions through a mixed model of Retinex algorithm suitable for local brightness contrast enhancement and haze removal based algorithm suitable for local brightness enhancement. We used the ExDark low-light image data set to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, and compared it with 14 various existing low-light improvement methods. As a result of the experiment, we confirmed that the proposed algorithm showed better performance than the existing low-light image improvement methods.
Keywords
Low-light image enhancement
Nighttime image
Retinex
Haze remove
Color transfer
NR-IQA
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Information
  • Publisher :The Society of Convergence Knowledge
  • Publisher(Ko) :융복합지식학회
  • Journal Title :The Society of Convergence Knowledge Transactions
  • Journal Title(Ko) :융복합지식학회논문지
  • Volume : 10
  • No :3
  • Pages :73-102
  • DOI :https://doi.org/10.22716/sckt.2022.10.3.026
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