Low-Light Sparse Polarization Demosaicing Network (LLSPD-Net): Polarization Image Demosaicing Based on Stokes Vector Completion in Low-Light Environment

Abstract

Polarization imaging has achieved a wide range of applications in military and civilian fields such as camouflage detection and autonomous driving. However, when the imaging environment involves a low-light condition, the number of photons is low and the photon transmittance of the conventional Division-of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) structure is small. Therefore, the traditional demosaicing methods are often used to deal with the serious noise and distortion generated by polarization demosaicing in low-light environment. Based on the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a model called Low-Light Sparse Polarization Demosaicing Network (LLSPD-Net) for simulating a sparse polarization sensor acquisition of polarization images in low-light environments. The model consists of two parts: an intensity image enhancement network and a Stokes vector complementation network. In this work, the intensity image enhancement network is used to enhance low-light images and obtain high-quality RGB images, while the Stokes vector is used to complement the network. We discard the traditional idea of polarization intensity image interpolation and instead design a polarization demosaicing method with Stokes vector complementation. By using the enhanced intensity image as a guide, the completion of the Stokes vector is achieved. In addition, to train our network, we collected a dataset of paired color polarization images that includes both low-light and regular-light conditions. A comparison with state-of-the-art methods on both self-constructed and publicly available datasets reveals that our model outperforms traditional low-light image enhancement demosaicing methods in both qualitative and quantitative experiments.