Retinex‐inspired contrast stretch and detail boosting for lowlight image enhancement

Abstract

Lowlight images with low brightness and contrast, blurry details usually bring us an uncomfortable visual experience. To promote the quality of these deviation images, this paper presents a new and efficient approach, named MFMR, for enhancing lowlight images in the hue‐saturation‐value (HSV) colour space. Concretely, the multi‐angle filter is first applied to estimate the artifact‐free illumination and reflection component of the V‐channel. Afterward, the adaptive bi‐interval histogram with human visual characteristics and morphological operations is employed to process the former, adaptive gamma correction to process the latter for generating various feature maps. In the end, these feature maps are united via adaptive multi‐scale fusion strategy to reconstruct high‐quality images, which are characterized by high contrast and brightness, vivid colour, and clearer details. Extensive experiments show that this method is a well‐proven low‐light image enhancement approach, which outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art comparison methods. Furthermore, the proposed method also can yield satisfying images in the heavy foggy, yellow sand, underwater, and other severe conditions.