Color Constancy-Based Visibility Enhancement in Low-Light Conditions

Abstract

Imaging in low-light conditions is often significantly degraded by insufficient lighting and color cast. Poor visibility becomes a major problem for many applications of computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel color constancy-based method to enhance the visibility of low-light images. The proposed method applies an appropriate color constancy algorithm to the active set of pixels across the image. The post-processing step is also added to enhance the global contrast and lightness. Results on a wide variety of images demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve good rendition for lightness, contrast and color fidelity without graying-out artifacts or halo artifacts intrinsically present in Retinex approaches.