  Low-light images are not conducive to human observation and computer vision
algorithms due to their low visibility. Although many image enhancement
techniques have been proposed to solve this problem, existing methods
inevitably introduce contrast under- and over-enhancement. Inspired by human
visual system, we design a multi-exposure fusion framework for low-light image
enhancement. Based on the framework, we propose a dual-exposure fusion
algorithm to provide an accurate contrast and lightness enhancement.
Specifically, we first design the weight matrix for image fusion using
illumination estimation techniques. Then we introduce our camera response model
to synthesize multi-exposure images. Next, we find the best exposure ratio so
that the synthetic image is well-exposed in the regions where the original
image is under-exposed. Finally, the enhanced result is obtained by fusing the
input image and the synthetic image according to the weight matrix. Experiments
show that our method can obtain results with less contrast and lightness
distortion compared to that of several state-of-the-art methods.
