A night-time outdoor data set for low-light enhancement

Abstract

Low light Enhancement has been a hot topic in recent years, and many deep neural network (DNN)-based methods have achieved remarkable performance. However, the rapid development of DNNs also raises the urgent requirement of high-quality training sets, especially supervised night-time data sets. In this paper, we establish a night-time outdoor data set (NOD1) that contains 1214 groups of images. We also generate appropriate and high-quality reference images for each group based on multi-exposure fusion strategy, which not only focuses on dark areas but also provides details for over-exposed areas in low light images. Furthermore, a simple but efficient network is presented as the baseline of NOD. Experimental results on NOD and other data sets show the generalizability and effectiveness of the proposed data set and baseline model.