Pixel-Wise Polynomial Estimation Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Most existing low-light enhancement algorithms either use a large number of training parameters or lack generalization to real-world scenarios. This paper presents a novel lightweight and robust pixel-wise polynomial approximation-based deep network for low-light image enhancement. For mapping the low-light image to the enhanced image, pixel-wise higher-order polynomials are employed. A deep convolution network is used to estimate the coefficients of these higher-order polynomials. The proposed network uses multiple branches to estimate pixel values based on different receptive fields. With a smaller receptive field, the first branch enhanced local features, the second and third branches focused on medium-level features, and the last branch enhanced global features. The low-light image is downsampled by the factor of 2b-1 (b is the branch number) and fed as input to each branch. After combining the outputs of each branch, the final enhanced image is obtained. A comprehensive evaluation of our proposed network on six publicly available no-reference test datasets shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both quantitative and qualitative measures.