Enhancement of Low-Light Images Using Illumination Estimate and Local Steering Kernel

Images acquired in low-light conditions often have poor visibility. These images considerably degrade the performance of algorithms when used in computer vision and multi-media systems. Several methods for low-light image enhancement have been proposed to address these issues; furthermore, various techniques have been used to restore close-to-normal light conditions or improve visibility. However, there are problems with the enhanced image, such as saturation of local light sources, color distortion, and amplified noise. In this study, we propose a low-light image enhancement technique using illumination component estimation and a local steering kernel to address this problem. The proposed method estimates the illumination components in low-light images and obtains the images with illumination enhancement based on Retinex theory. The resulting image is then color-corrected and denoised using a local steering kernel. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, low-light images taken under various conditions are simulated using the proposed method, and it demonstrates visual and quantitative superiority to the existing methods.