Learning to Restore Low-Light Images via Decomposition-and-Enhancement

Low-light images typically suffer from two problems. First, they have low visibility (i.e., small pixel values). Second, noise becomes significant and disrupts the image content, due to low signal-to-noise ratio. Most existing lowlight image enhancement methods, however, learn from noise-negligible datasets. They rely on users having good photographic skills in taking images with low noise. Unfortunately, this is not the case for majority of the low-light images. While concurrently enhancing a low-light image and removing its noise is ill-posed, we observe that noise exhibits different levels of contrast in different frequency layers, and it is much easier to detect noise in the lowfrequency layer than in the high one. Inspired by this observation, we propose a frequency-based decompositionand-enhancement model for low-light image enhancement. Based on this model, we present a novel network that first learns to recover image objects in the low-frequency layer and then enhances high-frequency details based on the recovered image objects. In addition, we have prepared a new low-light image dataset with real noise to facilitate learning. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments to show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in enhancing practical noisy low-light images.