A lightweight multi‐branch network for low‐light image enhancement

Abstract

Abstract The generation process of low‐light images is fundamentally complicated due to their multi‐factorial degradation. Many previous methods favorably developed a multi‐branch network for impressive performance. However, the complex structures of multi‐branch networks always incur large computational cost and hinders their applicability in those resource‐limited settings. To alleviate these issues, in this letter a novel lightweight multi‐branch network (LMBN) for low‐light image enhancement is proposed. Specifically, a multi‐branch module and a joint loss are framed to surmount the complex degradation factors of low‐light images. Furthermore, the multi‐branch network is implemented by several heterogeneous and shallow encoder‐decoder modules. The elaborately designed lightweight model facilitates lower computational complexity but maintains impressive enhancement quality. The experimental results performed on three popularly benchmark databases demonstrate that the proposed LMBN shows the superior performance over other state‐of‐the‐art methods, indicating a perfect balance between the model's performance and the computational efficiency.