Enhancement and noise reduction of very low light level images

A general method for image contrast enhancement and noise reduction is proposed in this paper. The method is developed especially for enhancing images acquired under very low light conditions where the features of images are nearly invisible and the noise is serious. By applying an improved and effective image de-haze algorithm to the inverted input image, the intensity can be amplified so that the dark areas become bright and the contrast get enhanced. Then, the joint-bilateral filter with the original green component as the edge image is introduced to suppress the noise. Experimental results validate the performance of the proposed approach.