Low-Light Image Enhancement via Feature Restoration

Yang Yang, Yonghua Zhang, Xiaojie Guo

Abstract: Besides poor visibility, under-exposed images often suffer from severe noise and color distortion. Most existing Retinex-based methods deal with the noise and color distortion via some careful designs to denoising and/or color correction. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective network from the perspective of feature map restoration to mitigate such issues without constructing any explicit modules. More concretely, we build an encoder-decoder network to reconstruct images, while a feature restoration subnet is introduced to transform the features of low-light images to those of corresponding clear ones. The enhanced images are consequently acquired through assembling the restored features by the decoder, in which, the noise and possible color distortion can be greatly remedied. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets are conducted to validate the superiority of our design over other state-of-the-art alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code is available at https://github.com/YaN9-Y/FRLIE.