Low-light image enhancement based on variational Retinex model

The low-light image enhancement plays a crucial role in computer vision and multimedia applications. However, it is still a challenging task, as the degraded images reduce the visual naturalness and visibility. To address this problem, we build a novel variational Retinex model to accurately estimate the illumination and reflectance components. The illumination and reflectance are jointly updated by alternating optimization algorithm. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in Retinex decomposition and illumination adjustment.