The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications ›› 2022, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (2): 63-72.doi: 10.19682/j.cnki.1005-8885.2022.0004

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Multi-scale fusion residual encoder-decoder approach for low illumination image enhancement

  

  • Received:2021-01-13 Revised:2021-07-09 Online:2022-04-26 Published:2022-04-26
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project ( 2019YFC0121502 ), the Graduate Innovation Fund Project of Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications ( CXJJLY2019062 ), and the Key Laboratory of Network Data Analysis and Intelligent Processing of Shaanxi Province.

Abstract:

The sensing light source of the line scan camera cannot be fully exposed in a low light environment due to the extremely small number of photons and high noise, which leads to a reduction in image quality. A multi-scale fusion residual encoder-decoder (FRED) was proposed to solve the problem. By directly learning the end-to-end mapping between light and dark images, FRED can enhance the image's brightness with the details and colors of the original image fully restored. A residual block (RB) was added to the network structure to increase feature diversity and speed up network training. Moreover, the addition of a dense context feature aggregation module (DCFAM) made up for the deficiency of spatial information in the deep network by aggregating the context's global multi-scale features. The experimental results show that the FRED is superior to most other algorithms in visual effect and  quantitative evaluation of peak signa-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). For the factor that FRED can restore the brightness of images while representing the edge and color of the image effectively, a satisfactory visual quality is obtained under the enhancement of low-light.

Key words: image enhancement| low illumination|feature fusion| residual network