Low-light image enhancement based on sharpening-smoothing image filter

Low-light images suffer from poor visibility, severe noise, low contrast, and low brightness. To overcome these issues, many image enhancement methods have been proposed. Few techniques solve these problems simultaneously. This paper presents a low-light image enhancement method. The proposed method first applies the HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) transform to the input image. Here, a multi-scale decomposition of the Sharpening-Smoothing Image Filter (SSIF) is proposed to obtain approximation and detail sub-images of the V component. After the decomposition process, Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) is applied to the final approximation image to provide higher contrast. The detail sub-images are amplified and added to the enhanced approximation image to reconstruct the enhanced V component. Finally, inverse HSV transform is applied to the enhanced V component and H, S components to obtain the enhanced image. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides better visual quality and more natural colors than the compared state-of-the-art methods.