Low‐light image enhancement based on Retinex decomposition and adaptive gamma correction

Abstract Low‐light images suffer from poor visibility and noise. In this paper, a low‐light image enhancement method based on Retinex decomposition is proposed. A pyramid network is first utilized to extract multi‐scale features to improve the quality of Retinex decomposition. Then the decomposed illumination is refined via an adaptive Gamma correction network to handle non‐uniform illumination, while the decomposed reflectance is refined with a lightweight network. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by element‐wise multiplication between the refined illumination and reflectance components. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state‐of‐the‐art image enhancement methods.