Low-Light Image Enhancement Using Photometric Alignment with Hierarchy Pyramid Network

Low-light image enhancement can effectively assist high-level vision tasks that often fail in poor illumination conditions. Most previous data-driven methods, however, implemented enhancement directly from severely degraded low-light images that may provide undesirable enhancement results, including blurred detail, intensive noise, and distorted color. In this paper, inspired by a coarse-to-fine strategy, we propose an end-to-end image-level alignment with pixel-wise perceptual information enhancement pipeline for low-light image enhancement. A coarse adaptive global photometric alignment sub-network is constructed to reduce style differences, which facilitates improving illumination and revealing under-exposure area information. After the learned aligned image, a hierarchy pyramid enhancement sub-network is used to optimize image quality, which helps to remove amplified noise and enhance the local detail of low-light images. We also propose a multi-residual cascade attention block (MRCAB) that involves channel split and concatenation strategy, polarized self-attention mechanism, which leads to high-resolution reconstruction images in perceptual quality. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on various datasets and significantly outperformed other state-of-the-art methods in detail and color reproduction.