Underexposed Photo Enhancement Using Deep Illumination Estimation

This paper presents a new neural network for enhancing underexposed photos. Instead of directly learning an image-to-image mapping as previous work, we introduce intermediate illumination in our network to associate the input with expected enhancement result, which augments the network's capability to learn complex photographic adjustment from expert-retouched input/output image pairs. Based on this model, we formulate a loss function that adopts constraints and priors on the illumination, prepare a new dataset of 3,000 underexposed image pairs, and train the network to effectively learn a rich variety of adjustment for diverse lighting conditions. By these means, our network is able to recover clear details,…