Contrast Enhancement for Low-light Image Enhancement: A Survey

In this paper, various contrast and low-light image enhancement methods are described and classified into three categories: i) histogram-based, ii) transmission map–based, and iii) retinexbased. The performance of the image enhancement algorithms is evaluated by comparing the resulting images using low-contrast and low-light images acquired under different illumination conditions. Various image enhancement algorithms are analyzed for both performance and efficiency. The described image enhancement algorithms can be applied to various visual surveillance or video analytics applications with low-light, low-contrast video input.