PD-GAN: Perceptual-Details GAN for Extremely Noisy Low Light Image Enhancement

Extremely noisy low light enhancement suffers from high-level noise, loss of texture detail, and color degradation. When recovering color or illumination for images taken in a dark environment, the challenge for networks is how to balance the enhancement for noise and texture details for a good visual effect. A single network is not suitable for solving the ill-posed problem of mapping the input image's noise to the clear target in the ground truth. To solve the problems, we pro-pose perceptual-details GAN (PD-GAN) utilizing Zero-DCE to initially recover illumination and combine residual dense-block Encoder-Decoder structure to suppress noise while finely adjusting the illumination. Besides, fractional differential gradient masks are integrated into the discriminator to enhance details. Experiment results demonstrate that PD-GAN outperforms other methods on the extremely low-light image dataset.