  A simple and effective low-light image enhancement method based on a
noise-aware texture-preserving retinex model is proposed in this work. The new
method, called NATLE, attempts to strike a balance between noise removal and
natural texture preservation through a low-complexity solution. Its cost
function includes an estimated piece-wise smooth illumination map and a
noise-free texture-preserving reflectance map. Afterwards, illumination is
adjusted to form the enhanced image together with the reflectance map.
Extensive experiments are conducted on common low-light image enhancement
datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of NATLE.
