Retinex decomposition based low‐light image enhancement by integrating Swin transformer and U‐Net‐like architecture

Abstract Low‐light images are captured in environments with minimal lighting, such as nighttime or underwater conditions. These images often suffer from issues like low brightness, poor contrast, lack of detail, and overall darkness, significantly impairing human visual perception and subsequent high‐level visual tasks. Enhancing low‐light images holds great practical significance. Among the various existing methods for Low‐Light Image Enhancement (LLIE), those based on the Retinex theory have gained significant attention. However, despite considerable efforts in prior research, the challenge of Retinex decomposition remains unresolved. In this study, an LLIE network based on the Retinex theory is proposed, which addresses these challenges by integrating attention mechanisms and a U‐Net‐like architecture. The proposed model comprises three modules: the Decomposition module (DECM), the Reflectance Recovery module (REFM), and the Illumination Enhancement module (ILEM). Its objective is to decompose low‐light images based on the Retinex theory and enhance the decomposed reflectance and illumination maps using attention mechanisms and a U‐Net‐like architecture. We conducted extensive experiments on several widely used public datasets. The qualitative results demonstrate that the approach produces enhanced images with superior visual quality compared to the existing methods on all test datasets, especially for some extremely dark images. Furthermore, the quantitative evaluation results based on metrics PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, BRISQUE, and MUSIQ show the proposed model achieves superior performance, with PSNR and BRISQUE significantly outperforming the baseline approaches, where (PSNR, mean BRISQUE) values of the proposed method and the second best results are (17.14, 17.72) and (16.44, 19.65). Additionally, further experimental results such as ablation studies indicate the effectiveness of the proposed model.