Low-light image enhancement aims to improve the perceptual quality of images captured under low-light conditions. This paper proposes a novel generative adversarial network to enhance low-light image quality. Firstly, it designs a generator consisting of residual modules with hybrid attention modules and parallel dilated convolution modules. The residual module is designed to prevent gradient explosion during training and to avoid feature information loss. The hybrid attention module is designed to make the network pay more attention to useful features. A parallel dilated convolution module is designed to increase the receptive field and capture multi-scale information. Additionally, a skip connection is utilized to fuse shallow features with deep features to extract more effective features. Secondly, a discriminator is designed to improve the discrimination ability. Finally, an improved loss function is proposed by incorporating pixel loss to effectively recover detailed information. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in enhancing low-light images compared to seven other methods.
Keywords: generative adversarial networks; hybrid attention module; low-light image enhancement; parallel dilated convolution module.