2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 13 – 14 May 2021 | Coimbatore
LRD-Net: A Lightweight Deep Network for
Low-light Image Enhancement
2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 978-1-6654-2864-4/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICSPC51351.2021.9451681
Shivam Singhal
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Delhi Technological University
New Delhi, India
shivam 2k17co323@dtu.ac.in
Yash Raghav
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Delhi Technological University
New Delhi, India
1yashraghav@gmail.com
Abstract—The computer vision algorithms demonstrate su-
perior performance in the real world when provided with
high-quality image or video inputs. However, low-light or non-
uniformly illuminated conditions result in low visibility in the
captured images, thus demanding low-light image enhancement.
Therefore, the paper presents a lightweight deep learning-based
method, referred to as LRD-Net, for enhancing low-light images.
The proposed approach initially estimates the illumination map
using maximum of RGB color channels and then utilizes the
retinex theory to derive the corresponding reflectance. Further,
we propose a lightweight deep network for refining the estimated
reflectance, which is capable of restoring the lost structural and
textural details. Our proposed approach employs a lightweight
structure yet demonstrates competitive performance to various
state-of-the-art methods. The fast computation speed escalates the
practical usage of our method without compromising on quality,
as demonstrated by extensive experiments.
Index Terms—Low-light image enhancement, reflectance, illu-
mination, deep convolutional neural network.
I. I NTRODUCTION
There are significant advancements in the camera technol-
ogy over the past decades leading to high-quality images.
While modern cameras provide various options for capturing
moving, distant or ultra-wide scenes, they often fail in cap-
turing insufficiently illuminated scenes. Images clicked under
poor or non-uniform illumination conditions generally have
low visibility accompanied by noise and poor contrast. It
affects the visual quality of images and also impacts the ever-
growing applications of computer vision such as automated
driving, face recognition, and so on. Thus, enhancing the
low-light images becomes a critical task. A straightforward
approach involves simply increasing the overall brightness of
low-light images, but we rarely have uniformly illuminated
images. In most low-light images, the darkness is non-uniform,
thus losing the details present in already bright regions on
direct brightness adjustment. Therefore, there is a need to
focus on more sophisticated techniques that can restore the
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Srishti Nanduri
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Delhi Technological University
New Delhi, India
srishti.nanduri@gmail.com
Anil Singh Parihar
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Delhi Technological University
New Delhi, India
parihar.anil@gmail.com
details in non-uniform illumination images while dealing with
various color, contrast, and noise issues.
Some early researches include histogram equaliza-
tion [1], [2] and gamma correction [3], [4], [5] based methods
for enhancing low-light images. However, such techniques
generally increase the overall contrast of image without taking
the illumination factors in consideration. CLAHE [6] proposes
a modification to HE by focusing on local contrast rather
than global contrast, thus dealing with over-enhancement of
bright regions. Some other approaches derived from retinex
theory [7] include single-scale [8] and multi-scale retinex [9].
The growing interest in deep learning and its notable
performance on various tasks in image processing, including
dehazing [10], image-segmentation [11], etc. has led to the
introduction of various deep networks [12], [13], [14] for
enhancing low-light images. Msr-net [15] views the previously
introduced MSR in terms of a convolutional neural network
and maps the low-light images to normal-light images based
on an end-to-end mapping. However, various deep learning
methods based on encoder-decoder [16] or other similar
networks consist of a large number of layers making such
techniques computationally expensive. Thus, the paper focuses
on building a lightweight deep learning based method for low-
light image enhancement.
The main contributions of this study are described below:
• We propose a novel retinex theory based model, referred
to as LRD-Net, for low-light image enhancement that
works with little pre or post-processing.
• We leverage a lightweight deep network that directly
learns to adjust the estimated reflectance based on the
proposed multi-objective loss function.
• We conduct extensive experiments and compare the per-
formance of proposed method with other best alternatives.
The remaining paper is arranged in the following manner.
Section II presents some previous works that closely relate
to our method. Section III has the details of the proposed ap-
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 2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 13 – 14 May 2021 | Coimbatore
Fig. 1: The proposed framework of LRD-Net.
proach. Section IV comprises of experimental details followed
by results. Eventually, section V concludes the proposed work.
II. R ELATED W ORK
A wide variety of low-light image enhancement techniques
have been introduced so far. Our proposed LRD-Net takes
inspiration from the previously introduced works, and we
briefly discuss some closely related approaches in this section.
The initial attempts for enhancing low-light images relate
to histogram equalization [1], [2], [6] and gamma correc-
tion [3], [4], [5]. Some other early approaches [7], [8], [9]
are based on retinex theory, and are discussed by various
researchers [17], [18]. Such techniques consider the estimated
reflectance component as the final enhanced image leaving
behind the information carried by the illumination component.
SRIE [19] introduced a weighted variational model that esti-
mates both reflectance and illumination simultaneously. SRIE
provides noise suppression and maintains color constancy
to give visually pleasant output. NPEA [20] uses a bright-
pass filter for image decomposition and preserves the details
by using bi-log transformation while adjusting the estimated
illumination. Guo et al. [21] introduced a structure prior
for estimating the illumination map, which is subsequently
adjusted maintaining the illumination consistency. Some other
techniques [22], [23], [24] use fusion of multiple instances of
estimated illumination, thus effectively combining the proper-
ties of various approaches.
Besides the traditional methods, modern techniques leverage
various deep networks [16] for enhancing low-light images
and other similar tasks [10], [11]. Parihar et al. [25] stud-
ied various deep networks for low-light image enhancement.
LLNet [12] presented an autoencoder network that simulta-
neously performs both contrast enhancement and denoising.
GLADNet [13] uses illumination estimation followed by re-
construction of details lost due to illumination adjustment. Wei
et al. [14] presented a deep network for image decomposition,
followed by multi-scale illumination adjustment. It employs
dedicated BM3D [26] denoiser to deal with the inherent noise
but the denoising operation over-smooths the enhanced image.
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In contrast to retinex based deep networks, Zero-DCE [27]
performs the enhancement by estimating image-specific curve
parameters and iteratively applying them on the three channels
of the input low-light image. EnlightenGAN [28] is a modern
generative adversarial network based approach that works in
an unsupervised fashion by training a global-local discrim-
inator network. Nevertheless, a majority of proposed deep
networks are computationally expensive, thus paving the way
for faster and more practical deep learning based approaches.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
The paper proposes a lightweight retinex theory based deep
network, called LRD-Net, for enhancing low-light images.
The proposed framework is shown in Fig. 1. The proposed
approach mainly includes intrinsic image decomposition into
reflectance and illumination followed by adjustments in the
estimated components.
The proposed method takes motivation from the Retinex
theory [7] which considers an image (I) as made up of two
components, namely reflectance and illumination.
I=R·S (1)
where R and S are used to represent reflectance and illumina-
tion respectively. The illumination component depends on the
lighting conditions while the image is captured. On the other
hand, reflectance comprises of the details of the scene and
is assumed to be constant for a scene given varying lighting
conditions. As illustrated by [21], [22], maximum value of
the three color channels contains most of the lighting infor-
mation and therefore, characterizes the illumination. Thus, the
proposed approach employs the max-channel of the input low-
light image to estimate the illumination component as follows.
S= max Ik (2)
k∈{R,G,B}
Based on the estimated illumination, we compute the re-
flectance component as:
I
R= (3)
S
 2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 13 – 14 May 2021 | Coimbatore
(a) I (b) R
(e) Rnew
Fig. 2: Example to demonstrate the working of proposed method. (a) Input low-light image; (b) Estimated reflectance; (c)
Estimated illumination; (d) Gamma corrected illumination; (e) Adjusted reflectance; (f) Initial enhanced image; (g) Final
enhanced image.
The reflectance and illumination components for a sample low-
light image as estimated by (2) and (3) are shown in Fig. 2.
One may observe in Fig. 2(b) that the estimated reflectance
comprises of a lot of details that seem lost in the input low-lit
image.
The proposed approach subsequently adjusts the illumina-
tion using gamma correction [3], which leverages a point-wise
operation as shown below.
 γ
S(x)
Snew (x) = Smax , (4)
Smax
where γ is a fixed parameter and Smax denotes the maximum
intensity value of all the pixels S(x) in the illumination
component. The adjusted illumination component for a given
image is shown in Fig. 2(d). The recombination of estimated
reflectance and gamma adjusted illumination improves the
visibility to some extent as displayed in Fig. 2(f). However,
the reflectance component loses some structural and textural
details in the image decomposition process. Further, gamma
correction uses a fixed parameter to adjust the illumination
and therefore, results in loss of natural color information.
In order to handle such distortions, we present a lightweight
convolutional neural network to adjust the reflectance.
The proposed reflectance adjustment network is inspired
by [29], and learns a mapping between estimated reflectance
(R) and target reflectance (R̂) as obtained by:
Î
R̂ = , (5)
Snew
where Î is the normal-light ground truth image for input I.
The proposed architecture utilizes majorly three operations,
including patch extraction, non-linear mapping, and image
reconstruction, as shown in Fig. 1. The extracted patches con-
sist of feature maps obtained from the input reflectance. The
patches are subsequently mapped to another set of high-quality
feature maps, thus removing the distortions introduced in the
input reflectance. The reconstruction operation recombines
the improved patches to give the final adjusted reflectance
component. The proposed LRD-Net employs a three layer
architecture performing convolutional and rectified linear unit
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(c) S (d) Snew
(f) R · Snew (g) Rnew · Snew
operations in each of them. Further, we leverage different
kernel sizes for the three layers as indicated in Fig. 1.
In order to train the proposed network, we present a multi-
objective loss function comprising of three losses, namely
MSE loss, content loss, and PSNR loss. The MSE loss
calculates the pixel-wise dissimilarity between input and target
reflectance estimated as:
Lmse = kRnew − R̂k22 , (6)
where Rnew is the output of reflectance adjustment network.
The content loss [30] is used to preserve the image semantics,
and to make sure that the target and adjusted reflectance have
similar feature representation.
Lcontent = kφ(Rnew ) − φ(R̂)k22 , (7)
where φ() accounts for the feature map produced after the
4-th Conv layer of VGG-19 network. In order to deal with
the inherent noise in the reflectance component, we propose
the use of PSNR as a contributing loss. PSNR is widely used
for image quality estimation and, therefore, we leverage it to
represent the noise level in the output reflectance compared to
ground-truth image.

M AXR2new

LP SN R = −10 · log10 , (8)
M SE
where negative sign is used to reverse the behavior of PSNR,
as a greater PSNR value reflects better image quality. The final
loss function can be specified as:
Ltotal = wmse Lmse + wcontent Lcontent + wP SN R LP SN R ,
(9)
where wmse , wcontent , and WP SN R indicate the balancing
weights and are taken as 0.55, 0.3, and 0.15 respectively. Fig.
2 shows the estimated reflectance (R) for a low-light image
and the corresponding new reflectance (Rnew ) adjusted by the
proposed LRD-Net. Finally, the proposed method recombines
the adjusted reflectance (Rnew ) and enhanced illumination
(Snew ) to get the final enhanced image as displayed in Fig.
2(g). It may be noticed that the final enhanced output looks
more natural and preserves color information as compared to
initial gamma correction based enhanced image.
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 2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 13 – 14 May 2021 | Coimbatore

(a) Input (b) LIME (c) GLADNet (d) Retinex-Net (e) Zero-DCE (f) LRD-Net

Fig. 3: Visual comparison among various methods.

(a) Input (b) LIME (c) GLADNet (d) Retinex-Net (e) Zero-DCE (f) LRD-Net

Fig. 4: Visual comparison among various methods.

(a) Input (b) LIME (c) GLADNet (d) Retinex-Net (e) Zero-DCE (f) LRD-Net

Fig. 5: Visual comparison among various methods.

IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS from LOL dataset. On the other hand, NIQE is a blind
image quality metric calculated by taking images from all the
We use the publicly available LOL dataset [14] that has
mentioned datasets. A higher value is desirable for PSNR and
500 low/normal light image pairs. We utilize 485 image pairs
SSIM scores, while a good quality image has a low NIQE
for training the proposed LRD-Net, and use the remaining
value. Table 2 gives the values of the three metrics for LIME,
15 pairs along with other datasets, including ExDark [31] and
GLADNet, Retinex-Net, Zero-DCE, and proposed LRD-Net.
NPE [20] for evaluation. While training, the patch size is taken
From the values, we can observe that the proposed LRD-Net
as 128x128 and batch size is kept as 15. We present the per-
performs better than other approaches considering the PSNR
formance comparison of the proposed LRD-Net against vari-
and NIQE metrics. LIME works worst in terms of PSNR
ous state-of-the-art techniques, including LIME [21], GLAD-
value, while Zero-DCE fails in consideration of NIQE score.
Net [13], Retinex-Net [14], and Zero-DCE [27].
The SSIM value is highest for Retinex-Net, and our method
TABLE I: Quantitative comparison using PSNR, SSIM, and falls behind by a margin of 0.015. Thus, our approach shows
NIQE metrics effective performance in terms of quantitative metrics.
B. Visual Assessment
Metrics Quantitative metrics are insufficient in characterizing the
Method
PSNR SSIM NIQE visual quality of images as perceived by humans. Thus, we
present the visual comparison on some low-light images as
LIME [21] 13.170 0.720 6.113
enhanced by various methods. Fig. 3 gives the visual com-
GLADNet [13] 15.995 0.757 7.256 parison on a landscape scene captured in daylight. While all
Retinex-Net [14] 15.533 0.795 6.452
the methods give competitive performance in terms of detail
restoration, our method proves its superiority by producing
Zero-DCE [27] 14.395 0.694 8.254 a bright image with better details and contrast. GLADNet
LRD-Net 16.022 0.780 5.970 and Zero-DCE give fade outputs with poor colors. LIME and
Retinex-Net fall behind in terms of brightness improvement
as compared to our method.
A. Quantitative Assessment Fig. 4 shows another example of an indoor image enhanced
To assess the performance of the proposed LRD-Net quan- by various methods. We can see that LIME and Zero-DCE
titatively, we use three image quality assessment metrics, produce darker outputs with lesser details. Retinex-Net gives
including PSNR, SSIM, and NIQE [32]. PSNR and SSIM better performance in terms of restoring the details as com-
require ground-truth images and thus calculated using images pared to LIME and Zero-DCE but loses the naturalness and

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 2021 3rd International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication (ICPSC) | 13 – 14 May 2021 | Coimbatore
colors as evident in the color palette in Fig. 4(d). GLADNet
fails to maintain the color constancy as visible in Fig. 4(c).
Our method performs competitively compared to Retinex-Net
with regard to details and maintains the naturalness of colors
as visible in Fig. 4(f).
Fig. 5 shows an example of a night scene with lightning
in the sky. GLADNet and Retinex-Net produce fade results
while Zero-DCE gives comparatively darker output. It may
be noticed in Fig. 5(b) that LIME over-enhances the bright
regions. On the other hand, the proposed LRD-Net sufficiently
restores the details without over-enhancement. Therefore, our
method is capable of producing visually pleasant outputs.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented a novel lightweight deep learning
based method for low-light image enhancement. The proposed
method estimates the illumination using max-RGB color chan-
nel and computes the corresponding reflectance by element-
wise division of input image and estimated illumination. The
estimated reflectance is further refined using the proposed
lightweight three-layer network, called LRD-Net. The network
learns a mapping between estimated and target reflectance
in an end-to-end fashion, which is further recombined with
gamma adjusted illumination to get the enhanced image. From
the experiments, it is evident that the proposed technique
demonstrates superior performance to other state-of-the-art
approaches, and the lightweight structure gives it an advantage
over other methods considering the practical usage.
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