A NO-REFERENCE EVALUATION METRIC FOR LOW-LIGHT IMAGE ENHANCEMENT
Zicheng Zhang1 (B),Wei Sun1 ,Xiongkuo Min1 ,Wenhan Zhu2 ,Tao Wang1 ,Wei Lu1 ,and Guangtao Zhai1
1
Institute of Image Communication and Network Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
2021 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) | 978-1-6654-3864-3/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICME51207.2021.9428312
2
MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
zzc1998@sjtu.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
Low-light images, which are usually taken in dark or back-
lighting conditions, are hard to perceive due to the low visi-
bility and low contrast. To improve viewers’ Quality of Ex-
perience (QoE) and support the application of vision-based
systems, various low-light image enhancement algorithms
(LIEAs) have been proposed to lighten low-light images.
However, some LIEAs may amplify the hidden distortions in
the dark like noise and even further, introduce new distortions
such as structural damage, color shift, etc, which severely af-
fect the quality of light-enhanced images and need to be eval-
uated quantificationally. However, in the literature, few mea-
sures are proposed to assess the quality of light-enhanced im-
ages. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a no-reference low-
light image enhancement evaluation (NLIEE) metric to pre-
dict the quality of light-enhanced images. The image quality
is mainly assessed from four key aspects: light enhancement,
color comparison, noise measurement, and structure evalu-
ation. The experiment results show that NLIEE achieves the
best performance among the general no-reference image qual-
ity assessment (NR IQA) models and quality descriptors for
light enhancement.
Index Terms— Low-light image enhancement, no-
reference image quality assessment (NR IQA), structure sim-
ilarity
1. INTRODUCTION
Low-light images are captured in scenes with an insufficient
amount of light, which inevitably makes the image content
difficult to perceive. Some vision-based intelligent systems,
such as automatic driving, remote sensing, and homeland se-
curity, are severely affected by the low visibility of low-light
images. Therefore, many low-light image enhancement algo-
rithms (LIEA) have been proposed to lighten low-light im-
ages. However, driven by different strategies like denoising
and enhancing contrast, different LIEAs may result in differ-
ent quality of light-enhanced images, which need to be evalu-
ated quantificationally.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation of
China (No.61831015, 61771305, 61927809 and U1908210), and in part by
978-1-6654-3864-3/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
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In the current literature, the evaluation for LIEAs falls
behind. As far as we know, there is no image quality as-
sessment (IQA) algorithm specifically designed for light-
enhanced images and only a few quality descriptors are used
in [1][2][3][4] for evaluating LIEAs. However, these descrip-
tors have a low correlation with the quality of light-enhanced
images, which are demonstrated in Section 3. Generally
speaking, existing objective IQA methods are divided into
three categories: full-reference (FR), reduced-reference (RR),
and no-reference (NR). Although FR and RR IQA [5] usu-
ally perform well, the reference image is not available in most
cases, especially for low-light images, which is why we focus
on the NR IQA in this paper. In the past two decades, a series
of NR IQA methods [6][7] have been proposed. For example,
BRISQUE [8] assesses image quality based on scene statis-
tics of locally normalized luminance coefficients. NFERM
[9] uses free-energy-based brain theory as well as classical
human visual system (HVS)-inspired features to predict the
image of quality. NIQE [10] employs measurable deviations
from statistical regularities observed in natural images for im-
age quality evaluation. These methods are capable of extract-
ing effective image quality features and can accurately predict
the image quality in general IQA databases which are con-
cerned about limited types of distortions, such as JPEG com-
pression, Gaussian noise, Gaussian blur, etc. However, light-
enhanced images usually contain more than one type of dis-
tortions, which are much more complicated than the synthet-
ically distorted images in the general IQA databases. There-
fore, the traditional NR IQAs have a low correlation with the
quality of light-enhanced images.
To deal with the challenge of low-light image enhance-
ment evaluation, we propose a novel no-reference low-light
image enhancement evaluation (NLIEE) metric. First, we ex-
tract the shape and variance parameters of the illumination
distribution of light-enhanced images to reflect the effect of
light enhancement. Second, we compute the hue and satura-
tion relative entropy of light-enhanced image and its corre-
sponding low-light image as color features. Third, we extract
the noise features by estimating the Gaussian noise and salt-
National Key R&D Program of China (No.2019YFB1405900).
The code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/zzc-1998/NLIEE

(a)
0.6
Natural
Low-light
0.5
0.4
Probability
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
0 50 100 150 200
Luminance
(c)
Fig. 1. Example of a natural image and its corresponding
low-light image from the LIEQ database [11]. (a) and (b)
are the natural image and its corresponding low-light image,
(c) and (d) are the luminance probability distribution and the
normalized probability distribution of (a) and (b) respectively.
and-pepper noise level in noise-sensitive areas. Fourth, we
calculate the structure features using structure similarities of
different scales. Finally, we can obtain a total of 18 features
as the representation of the quality of light-enhanced images.
The features are regressed into a single quality score using
the support vector regression (SVR) model. To analyze the
performance of the proposed method, we compare the NLIEE
with other state-of-art NR IQAs as well as the quality descrip-
tors designed for evaluating LIEAs on the low-light image en-
hancement quality (LIEQ) database [11]. Experiment results
show that the proposed method performs the best on LIEQ
database among all compared methods.
2. PROPOSED METHOD
2.1. Pre-Processing
To better quantify the distortions of light-enhanced images,
we adopt the local normalization process as pre-processing,
which has been proved effective in many IQA problems.
Given an image I, the illumination map can be computed us-
ing the maximum of RGB channels
L(i, j) =
c∈{r,g,b}
where L represents the illumination map, i and j are pixel
indexes of the image. The normalized illumination map can
be derived as
L(i, j) − µ(i, j)
L̃(i, j) =
σ(i, j) + 1
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where w is a local
P Gaussian weighting window, the local
mean µ(i, j) = k,l wk,l L(i+k, j+l), and the local variance
qP
2
σ(i, j) = k,l wk,l [L(i + k, j + l) − µ(i, j)] . Following
the processes, the local mean, variance, and normalized illu-
mination map of low-light image and light-enhanced image
can be computed as µl , µe , σl , σe , L̃l , L̃e .
(b)
0.5
Natural
Low-light
2.2. Light Enhancement
0.4
The main purpose of LIEA is to light up low-light images,
0.3
Probability
thus luminance is the most important aspect for LIEA eval-
0.2 uation. An effective LIEA should recover the hidden image
content in low-light areas to an appropriate extent [12], thus
0.1
we adopt the normalized luminance distribution for light eval-
0.0 uation. As discussed in [8], the normalized luminance distri-
-3 -2 -1 0 1 2
Normalized Luminance bution of natural images tends to be Gaussian-like. However,
(d) suffering from the insufficient amount of light and low con-
trast, the normalized distribution of low-light images decays
faster in the shape and is more concentrated on the center
than natural images as illustrated in Fig.1. Hence, to mea-
sure the luminance enhancement between low-light and light-
enhanced images, we utilize the zero mean Generalized Gaus-
sian Distribution (GGD) [13] parameters estimated from the
luminance distribution of light-enhanced images as light en-
hancement features, which is given by
  α 
α |x|
GGD(x; α, β 2 ) = exp − , (3)
2βΓ(1/α) β
q
Γ(1/α) R∞
where β = σ Γ(3/α) , Γ(α) = 0
tα−1 e−t dt, α > 0 is the
gamma function, and the two estimated parameters (α, β 2 )
indicate the shape and variance of the distribution.
2.3. Color Comparison
When recovering original information of the image, some
LIEAs may violate the correctness of color transfer and per-
ception. Since the RGB color space does not precisely re-
flect the human eye’s perception of color, the image I is first
transformed from RGB color space to HSV color space which
represents hue, saturation, and value. Through the transfor-
mation, the hue and saturation maps of low-light and light-
enhanced images can be obtained as Hl , He , Sl , Se .
Affected by various types of distortions, low-light images
may have a greater disorder in color spaces than natural im-
ages, which has been revealed in [14]. Further, in many pre-
max I(i, j), (1)
vious IQA researches [15]-[16], entropy is adopted as an ef-
fective indicator for measuring disorder. Hence, to describe
the difference of color disorder between low-light and light-
enhanced images, we propose to utilize the relative entropy
(Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence) metric, which has been
demonstrated as a good indicator for measuring disorder dif-
, (2) ference. Then we note the relative entropy (KL) of hue and

(a)
(b) (c)
Fig. 2. An example for noise measurement. (a) is the noise
image, (b) shows salt-and-pepper noise in the blue rectangle
while (c) shows Gaussian noise in the red rectangle.
saturation maps as
Z lize the structure similarity of the distorted and reference im-
p(x)
KL(p(x)kq(x)) = p(x) log dx,
q(x)
x
Cχ = KL (χe , χl )) ,
where KL(·) represents the cross entropy function, p(x) and
q(x) are the distribution likelihood, subscript χ ∈ {H, S}
indicates the distributions for hue and saturation maps, χe and
χl represents the distribution map for light-enhanced and low-
light images respectively.
2.4. Noise Measurement
Noise can significantly affect image quality, especially in the
cases of an insufficient amount of light. As shown in Fig.
2, the noise in light-enhanced images can be generally di-
vided into Gaussian-like noise and salt-and-pepper-like noise.
Therefore, we measure the noise level by computing two spe-
cific noise estimation maps through the Gaussian filter and
the median filter, which are sensitive to Gaussian noise [17]
and salt-and-pepper noise [18] respectively. Then the noise
estimation maps are derived as the difference of the images
before and after filtering
Mγ = Fγ (Le ) − Le ,
where Mγ indicates the noise estimation map and γ ∈
{gaussian, median}, Fγ indicates the filtering function for
Gaussian filtering with the kernel size of 7x7 or median fil-
tering with the kernel of 3x3. In most cases, the dark and flat
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areas are more susceptible to noise, so we estimate the noise
level by the pooling of the noise estimation maps in the flat
and dark areas
1 X
Nγ = Mγ (i, j),
TΩ (6)
(i,j)∈Ω
Ω = {(i, j) | µl (i, j) < E(µl ), σl < E(σl )},
where Nγ represents the noise measurement for Gaussian
noise and salt-and-pepper noise, E(·) is the average opera-
tor, TΩ is the number of the pixels in the flat and dark area set
Ω, and set Ω includes all pixels of low-light images whose lo-
cal mean and variance are lower than the average local mean
and variance.
2.5. Structure Evaluation
The structure information can effectively reflect the degra-
dations of light-enhanced images. In this section, the im-
age structure is mainly evaluated by structural restoration
and over-enhancement. Fig.3 illustrates two typical exam-
ples of structure evaluation. The structural restoration gen-
erally focuses on the enhancement in dark and sharp areas
that may contain rich structure information while the over-
enhancement usually occurs in the low contrast and flat area
because some meaningless details are taken as image struc-
ture and then enhanced out. In FR IQA, it is common to uti-
ages to evaluate the structural restoration. However, perfect
(4) reference images are not available for light-enhanced image
evaluation. Since we only care about the changes in the struc-
ture information which influence the image quality, we simply
take low-light images as approximate reference. Specifically,
the overall structural restoration can be described with four
parameters: variance similarity, normalized variance similar-
ity, normalized illumination map similarity, and edge similar-
ity, which can be given by
2θl · θe + c
Sθ = , (7)
θl2 + θe2 + c
where θ ∈ {σ, η, L̃, ρ}, σ means the variance map, η denotes
the normalized variance map, L̃ denotes the normalized illu-
mination map, ρ denotes the log edge map, and c is a small
constant used to avoid instability. For light-enhanced images,
more attention is paid to the structure enhancement effect in
the dark and sharp areas that are more likely to have hidden
structure information, thus we calculate the similarities in the
areas with lower luminance and greater contrast. Specifically,
the luminance and contrast can be characterized by the local
mean and the local variance. Then the structure enhancement
(5) can be described by pooling the structure similarity maps in
the areas mentioned above, which can be derived as
1 X
Eθ = Sθ (i, j),
Tφ (8)
(i,j)∈φ
φ = {(i, j) | µl (i, j) < E(µl ), σl (i, j) > E(σl )},
 (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f)

Fig. 3. An illustration for structure evaluation. (a) and (b) show the structure evaluation area in low-light and light-enhanced
images. (c) and (d) show the low contrast area with over-enhancement effect in the blue rectangle, (e) and (f) show the dark and
sharp area with structure enhancement in the red rectangle respectively.

Labeled pairs Feature Groups

Light
Enhancement
Regression
SVR
Color
Comparison
…

18 Features
…
Noise
Quality Score
Measurement
Structure
Evaluation

Fig. 4. Framework of the proposed method.

where φ indicates the set including pixels whose local mean
is lower than the average value of µl , and local variance is
larger than the average value of σl . Specifically, µl and σl
represent the local mean map and local contrast map for low-
light images. Tφ indicates the number of the pixels in set φ.
The main factors causing structure over-enhancement is
the enhanced meaningless details, which usually occur in the
low contrast area. Therefore, we simply utilize the average
pooling result of the structure similarity maps in the low con-
trast areas as the structure over-enhancement features, which
are given by
1 X
Oθ = Sθ (i, j),
T well-lighted ones. Further, 10 representative low-light im-
(i,j)∈ψ
(9)
ψ = {(i, j) | σl (i, j) < E(σl ),
σe (i, j) − σl (i, j) > E(σe − σl )},
where ψ indicates the set including pixels whose local vari-
ance is lower than the average value of σl , and variance en-
hancement is larger than the average value of the enhance-
ment map, which is defined as σe − σl . Tψ indicates the num-
ber of the pixels in set ψ.
support vector regression (SVR) as the regression model. La-
beled low-light and light-enhanced image pairs are used to
train the regressor, then the trained regressor can predict the
image quality through the same framework.
3. EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE
3.1. Dataset
The proposed method NLIEE is validated on the low-light im-
age enhancement quality (LIEQ) database [11]. The LIEQ
database selects 100 typical scene images from the multi-
exposure image database in [19], which is constructed espe-
cially for providing low-light images and their corresponding
age enhancement algorithms are employed to generate a total
of 1,000 light-enhanced images. A subjective quality assess-
ment study has been performed on the LIEQ database, and the
Mean Opinion Scores (MOSs) are provided for each light-
enhanced image. To the best of our knowledge, the LIEQ
database is the first database designed for low-light image en-
hancement quality assessment study.
3.2. Evaluation Competitors

2.6. Feature Regression
As illustrated in Fig.4, NLIEE mainly consists of two mod-
ules: feature extraction described above, and feature regres-
sion described in this section. Following the extraction pro-
cesses, a feature vector consisting of 18 features can be ob-
tained as illustrated in Table 1. In this paper, we utilize the
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the NLIEE metric, some
IQAs that may be effective for the quality of light-enhanced
images are selected for evaluation. Specifically, the selected
measures are divided into two categories:
• Descriptors designed for light enhancement, including
lightness order error (LOE) [3], color constancy (CC) [1], dis-
crete entropy (DE) [1] and contrast enhancement (CE) [2].

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 Table 1. Overview features for proposed method
Feature group Feature ID Feature Description Symbol Computation
Light enhancement f1 − f2 GGD shape and scale (α,β) Eq.(3)
Color comparison f3 − f4 Hue and saturation entropy difference (CH ,CS ) Eq.(4)
Noise measurement f5 − f6 Noise measurement in dark and flat areas (Ng ,Nm ) Eq.(6)
f 7 − f 10 Overall structure similarity (Sθ ,Sη ,SL̃ ,Sρ ) Eq.(7)
Structure evaluation f 11 − f 14 Enhancement in dark and sharp areas (Eθ ,Eη ,EL̃ ,Eρ ) Eq.(8)
f 15 − f 18 Over-enhancement in low contrast areas (Oθ ,Oη ,OL̃ ,Oρ ) Eq.(9)

Table 2. Performance comparison with other NR IQAs

Criteria LOE CC DE CE BRISQUE ILNIQE HIGRADE NIQE NFERM Proposed
SRCC 0.1372 0.5044 0.4680 0.2932 0.6521 0.5621 0.6541 0.6136 0.6499 0.8503
PLCC 0.1662 0.5136 0.4913 0.2647 0.5832 0.6526 0.6581 0.6420 0.6551 0.8391
KRCC 0.0913 0.3486 0.3210 0.1218 0.4615 0.44598 0.4761 0.4327 0.4654 0.6596
RMSE 13.7514 12.1392 12.3229 14.0145 13.3091 11.6145 11.8109 10.6529 10.3819 7.5344

• General NR IQAs methods including BRISQUE [8], IL-

Table 3. Performance of different feature groups
NIQE [20], HIGRADE [21], NIQE [10], NFERM [9], and
NFSDM [22]. Criteria G1 G2 G3 G4 G5
SRCC 0.8503 0.7504 0.5960 0.6383 0.4410
3.3. Evaluation Criteria and Setup PLCC 0.8391 0.7718 0.6021 0.6465 0.5246
KRCC 0.6596 0.5595 0.4216 0.4577 0.3088
Four mainstream consistency evaluation criteria are utilized RMSE 7.5344 9.0927 11.1021 10.9029 12.3610
to compare the correlation between the predicted scores and
MOSs, which include Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient
(SRCC), Kendall’s Rank Correlation Coefficient (KRCC), 3.5. Ablation Experiment
Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC), Root Mean In this section, we conduct the ablation experiment to further
Squared Error (RMSE). test the contribution of different feature groups. According to
As described in Section 2.6, the proposed method has a re- Table 1 and Table 3, feature groups are listed by the corre-
gression module that requires training. Therefore, the whole sponding category, specifically:
dataset is split into an 80 percent training set and a 20 percent • G1: With all features.
testing set. To avoid the influence of different image content, • G2: Without light enhancement features.
all the light-enhanced images of the same scene can only be • G3: Without color comparison features.
in the training set or the testing set. This process is repeated • G4: Without noise measurement features.
1,000 times and the median results of SRCC, RMSE, PLCC, • G5: Without structure evaluation features.
and KRCC are recorded as the final performance. To make the The results are listed in Table 3. It is observed that the per-
comparison fair, we adopt the same splitting sets and training formances of G2−G5 are all inferior to the complete features.
principles for other NR IQA models. Further, we find that G5 gets the lowest performance, which
indicates that the structure evaluation features contribute most
3.4. Comparison Discussion to NLIEE. Besides, the color comparison and noise measure-
ment features are of great significance for assessing the qual-
The final performance is shown in Table 2, from which sev-
ity of light-enhanced images. Among G2 − G5, G2 performs
eral observations can be obtained. First, the proposed method
best, which means that the light enhancement features con-
performs the best compared with other IQA models, which
tribute relatively little to NLIEE compared with other fea-
demonstrates the effectiveness of the NLIEE metric. Second,
tures. It may be explained that the features computed in
the descriptors designed especially for light enhancement per-
other groups may contain some redundant information with
form mediocre, which is because such descriptors consider
the light enhancement features.
only one aspect of image distortions and light-enhanced im-
ages contain more than one type of distortions. Third, some
general NR IQA measures have a certain ability to predict the 4. CONCLUSION
quality of light-enhanced images. It may be because that such
NR IQAs can capture the features which are in line with the This paper proposes a no-reference low-light image enhance-
judging principles of light-enhanced images, however, they ment (NLIEE) metric to evaluate the effect of LIEAs. The
are not as effective as the proposed method. proposed method extracts 18 features mainly from four as-

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pects: light enhancement, color comparison, noise measure-
ment, and structure evaluation. Then, the features are re-
gressed to a single quality score through SVR. Experiment
results show that the proposed method performs the best on
the LIEQ database among other NR IQAs, which suggests
that our method can be utilized to evaluate LIEAs quantita-
tively and optimize viewer experience along with practical
vision-based systems. The ablation experiment shows that all
four groups contribute to quality assessment, among which
the structure features contribute the most.
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