title: Low-Light Image Enhancement Using Adaptive Digital Pixel Binning.
abstract: This paper presents an image enhancement algorithm for low-light scenes in an environment with insufficient illumination. Simple amplification of intensity exhibits various undesired artifacts: noise amplification, intensity saturation, and loss of resolution. In order to enhance low-light images without undesired artifacts, a novel digital binning algorithm is proposed that considers brightness, context, noise level, and anti-saturation of a local region in the image. The proposed algorithm does not require any modification of the image sensor or additional frame-memory; it needs only two line-memories in the image signal processor (ISP). Since the proposed algorithm does not use an iterative computation, it can be easily embedded in an existing digital camera ISP pipeline containing a high-resolution image sensor.
authors.affiliation: Image Processing and Intelligent Systems Laboratory Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia, and Film Chung-Ang University, Seoul 156-756, Korea. whitener@cau.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Yoonjong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yoo
authors.affiliation: CIS Division, SK Hynix, Gyeonggi-do 463-844, Korea. jaehyun2.im@sk.com.
authors.forename: Jaehyun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Im
authors.affiliation: Image Processing and Intelligent Systems Laboratory Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science, Multimedia, and Film Chung-Ang University, Seoul 156-756, Korea. paikj@cau.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Joonki
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Paik
keywords: anti-saturation; image enhancement; pixel binning