A low-light image enhancement method for personnel safety monitoring in underground coal mines

Intelligent monitoring technology plays an important role in promoting the development of coal mine safety management. Low illumination in the coal mine underground leads to difficult recognition of monitoring images and poor personnel detection accuracy. To alleviate this problem, a low illuminance image enhancement method proposed for personnel safety monitoring in underground coal mines. Specifically, the local enhancement module maps low illumination to normal illumination at pixel level preserving image details as much as possible. The transformer-based global adjustment module is applied to the locally enhanced images to avoid over-enhancement of bright areas and under-illumination of dark areas, and to prevent possible color deviations in the enhancement process. In addition, a feature similarity loss is proposed to constrain the similarity of target features to avoid the possible detrimental effect of enhancement on detection. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the detection accuracy by 7.1% on the coal mine underground personal dataset, obtaining the highest accuracy compared to several other methods. The proposed method effectively improves the visualization and detection performance of low-light images, which contributes to the personnel safety monitoring in underground coal mines.