Image enhancement for extremely low light conditions

In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed for contrast enhancement and noise reduction in very noisy data with low dynamic range on images captured by surveillance camera under extremely low light condition. For the initial noise reduction, a motion adaptive temporal filtering based on the Kalman filter is employed. Then, the denoised image is first inverted and subsequently dehazed as a tone mapping to enhance the visibility based on the observation that the inverted low light image presents quite similar characteristics to hazy image. Finally, the remaining noise is removed using the Non-local means (NLM) denoising step. The overall approach essentially transforms very dark images progressively into more visible form and effectively reduces the high intensity noise generated by the tone mapping process. From the experimental results, effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by comparing with the most recent and leading conventional method.