Combining Visual Saliency and Attention Mechanism for Low-Light Image Enhancement
SHANG Xiaoke1,2, AN Nan2, SHANG Jingjie3, ZHANG Shaomin1, DING Nai1,4
1.College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027; 2.School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116622; 3.School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing 102600; 4.Research Center for Applied Mathematics and Machine Intelligence, Research Institute of Basic Theories, Zhejiang Laboratory, Hangzhou 311121
Abstract：Low-light image enhancement is the foundation and core step for solving various visual analysis tasks in low-light environments. However, the existing mainstream methods generally fail to characterize structural information effectively, resulting in some problems, such as unbalanced exposure and color distortion. Therefore, a low-light image enhancement network combining visual saliency and attention mechanism is proposed in this paper. A low-light image enhancement framework based on attention mechanism is firstly constructed by introducing attention mechanism with consideration of both local details and global information to characterize the color information in the enhancement results correctly. To achieve refined construction, a progressive process is designed to refine the enhancement process in stages following the concept of gradual optimization from coarse to fine. The feature fusion module guided by visual saliency is introduced to enhance the ability of the network to perceive salient objects in images and improve the expression of structural information from a perspective of being more in line with visual cognitive needs. Thus, noise/artifacts and other problems are avoided effectively. Experimentsshow that the proposed method solves the problems of unbalanced exposure and color distortion effectively with superior performance.
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2022, Vol. 35 
