Illumination-guided dual-branch fusion network for partition-based image exposure correction

Images captured in the wild often suffer from issues such as under-exposure, over-exposure, or sometimes a combination of both. These images tend to lose details and texture due to uneven exposure. The majority of image enhancement methods currently focus on correcting either under-exposure or over-exposure, but there are only a few methods available that can effectively handle these two problems simultaneously. In order to address these issues, a novel partition-based exposure correction method is proposed. Firstly, our method calculates the illumination map to generate a partition mask that divides the original image into under-exposed and over-exposed areas. Then, we propose a Transformer-based parameter estimation module to estimate the dual gamma values for partition-based exposure correction. Finally, we introduce a dual-branch fusion module to merge the original image with the exposure-corrected image to obtain the final result. It is worth noting that the illumination map plays a guiding role in both the dual gamma model parameters estimation and the dual-branch fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on 9 datasets with paired or unpaired samples. Our codes are available at https://github.com/csust7zhangjm/ExposureCorrectionWMS. © 2024 Elsevier Inc.