Contextual Information Aided Generative Adversarial Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement has been gradually becoming a hot research topic in recent years due to its wide usage as an important pre-processing step in computer vision tasks. Although numerous methods have achieved promising results, some of them still generate results with detail loss and local distortion. In this paper, we propose an improved generative adversarial network based on contextual information. Specifically, residual dense blocks are adopted in the generator to promote hierarchical feature interaction across multiple layers and enhance features at multiple depths in the network. Then, an attention module integrating multi-scale contextual information is introduced to refine and highlight discriminative features. A hybrid loss function containing perceptual and color component is utilized in the training phase to ensure the overall visual quality. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model achieves relatively good results and has good generalization capacity compared to other state-of-the-art low-light enhancement algorithms.