Nighttime image enhancement based on image decomposition

Nighttime image captured in low- or non-uniform illumination scene always suffers from the loss of visibility and contains various noise and objectionable artifact. When we enlarge the amplitude of the brightness, the noise and artifact will be amplified as well. Hence, we propose a nighttime image enhancement approach based on image decomposition. We decompose the input image into two components: Structure layer contains main information of the image, and texture layer contains details, noise, and artifacts. We implement an improved retinex image enhancement algorithm to enhance the structure layer. To remain details and suppress noise and artifact in the texture layer, we use mask-weighted least squares method. In the final, we fuse these two components to obtain the result. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the perceptual quality of nighttime images and suppress noise and artifact without excessive reinforcement.