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Learning to See in the Dark (arxiv.org)
1 point by jonbaer on May 16, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Raw short-exposure night photos are paired with clean long-exposure versions, and a network turns the sensor data straight into a bright, clear picture. Unlike the usual separate cleanup and brightening steps, which fail in near darkness, it recovers usable images from very short night exposures.

Abstract

Imaging in low light is challenging due to low photon count and low SNR. Short-exposure images suffer from noise, while long exposure can induce blur and is often impractical. A variety of denoising, deblurring, and enhancement techniques have been proposed, but their effectiveness is limited in extreme conditions, such as video-rate imaging at night. To support the development of learning-based pipelines for low-light image processing, we introduce a dataset of raw short-exposure low-light images, with corresponding long-exposure reference images. Using the presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fully-convolutional network. The network operates directly on raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on such data. We report promising results on the new dataset, analyze factors that affect performance, and highlight opportunities for future work. The results are shown in the supplementary video at https://youtu.be/qWKUFK7MWvg

Chen Chen, Qifeng Chen, Jia Xu, Vladlen Koltun
arXiv:1805.01934 · cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG · submitted May 4, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Published at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2018)

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