Deep Color Consistent Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) explores how to refine the illumination and obtain natural normal-light images. Current LLIE methods mainly focus on improving the illumination, but do not consider the color consistency by reasonably incorporating color information into the LLIE process. As a result, color difference usually exists between the enhanced image and ground-truth. To address this issue, we propose a new deep color consistent network termed DCC-Net to retain the color consistency for LLIE. A new “divide and conquer” collaborative strategy is presented, which can jointly preserve color information and enhance the illumination. Specifically, the decoupling strategy of our DCC-Net decouples each color image into two main components, i.e., gray image plus color histogram. Gray image is used to generate reasonable structures and textures, and the color histogram is beneficial for preserving the color consistency. That is, they both are utilized to complete the LLIE task collaboratively. To match the color and content features, and reduce the color consistency gap between enhanced image and ground-truth, we also design a new pyramid color embedding (PCE) module, which can better embed color information into the LLIE process. Extensive experiments on six real datasets show that the enhanced images of our DCC-Net are more natural and colorful, and perform favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.