Extremely Low-light Image Enhancement with Scene Text Restoration

Abstract

Deep learning based methods have made impressive progress in enhancing extremely low-light images - the image quality of the reconstructed images has generally improved.\ua0However, we found out that most of these methods could not sufficiently recover the image details, for instance the texts inthe scene. In this paper, a novel image enhancement framework is proposed to specifically restore the scene texts, as well as the overall quality of the image simultaneously under extremely low-light images conditions. Particularly, we employed a selfregularised attention map, an edge map, and a novel text detection loss. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results have shown that the proposed model outperforms stateof-the-art methods in terms of image restoration, text detection,\ua0and text spotting on See In the Dark and ICDAR15 datasets