Low‑light enhancement method with dual branch feature fusion and learnable regularized attention

Restricted by the lighting conditions,the images captured at night tend to sufer from color aberration,noise,and other unfavorable factors,making it difcult for subsequent vision-based applications.To solve this problem,we propose a two-stage size-controllable low-light enhancement method,named Dual Fusion Enhancement Net(DFEN).The whole algorithm is built on a double U-Net structure,implementing brightness adjustment and detail revision respectively.A dual branch feature fusion module is adopted to enhance its ability of feature extraction and aggregation.We also design a learnable regularized attention module to balance the enhancement efect on diferent regions.Besides,we introduce a cosine training strategy to smooth the transition of the training target from the brightness adjustment stage to the detail revision stage during the training process.The proposed DFEN is tested on several low-light datasets,and the experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm achieves superior enhancement results with the similar parameters.It is worth noting that the lightest DFEN model reaches 11 FPS for image size of 1224×10^(24)in an RTX 3090 GPU.