DALE : Dark Region-Aware Low-light Image Enhancement

In this paper, we present a novel low-light image enhancement method called dark region-aware low-light image enhancement (DALE), where dark regions are accurately recognized by the proposed visual attention module and their brightness are intensively enhanced. Our method can estimate the visual attention in an efficient manner using super-pixels without any complicated process. Thus, the method can preserve the color, tone, and brightness of original images and prevents normally illuminated areas of the images from being saturated and distorted. Experimental results show that our method accurately identifies dark regions via the proposed visual attention, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods.