Advanced Retinex-Net image enhancement method based on value component processing

Abstract

When capturing images under low-light lighting conditions, the resulting images often suffer low visibility. Such low-visibility images not only affect the visual effect but also cause many difficulties in practical application. Therefore, image enhancement technology under low-light conditions has always been a challenging problem in image algorithms. Considering that most of the existing image enhancement methods are based on the RGB color space enhancement technology, the correlation among the RGB three primary colors is ignored, which makes the color distortion phenomenon easy to occur when the image is enhanced. To solve the problems of poor image visibility and color deviation under low-light conditions, in this paper an advanced Retinex network enhancement method is proposed. In the method, firstly the low-light RGB image is transformed into HSV color space, the Retinex decomposition network is used to decompose and enhance the value component separately, and thus increasing the resolution of the value component through up-sampling operation; then, for the hue component and saturation component, the nearest neighbor interpolation is used to increase their resolutions, and the enhanced value component is combined to convert back to RGB color space to obtain the initial enhanced image; finally, the wavelet transform image fusion technology is used to fuse with the original low-light image to eliminate the over-enhanced part in the initial enhanced image. The analysis of experimental results shows that the method proposed in this paper has obvious advantages in brightness enhancement and color restoration of low-light images. Especially, comparing with the original Retinex network method, the NIQE value decreases by an average of 19.49%, and the image standard deviation increases by an average of 41.35%. The algorithm proposed in this paper is expected to be effectively used in the fields of security monitoring and biomedicine.