Low-light Image Enhancement Method by Variable e-Filter and Multiscale Smoothing-based Image Enhancement

Recently, a lot of low-light image enhancement methods have been proposed. However, the conventional methods have some problems such as causing over enhancement in bright regions and/or noise amplification in dark regions. In this paper, we propose a new low-light image enhancement method to cope with these problems. In the proposed method, the dark and flat regions, where noise tends to be amplified, are smoothed by applying variable epsilon-filter to the input image. Then, the contrast of image is enhanced by applying multiscale smoothing-based image enhancement method. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparisons with the state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement methods.