Abstract
Imaging in low light is challenging due to low photon count and low SNR. Short-exposure images suffer from
noise, while long exposure can induce blur and is often
impractical. A variety of denoising, deblurring, and enhancement techniques have been proposed, but their effectiveness is limited in extreme conditions, such as video-rate
imaging at night. To support the development of learningbased pipelines for low-light image processing, we introduce a dataset of raw short-exposure low-light images, with
corresponding long-exposure reference images. Using the
presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing
low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fullyconvolutional network. The network operates directly on
raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on
such data. We report promising results on the new dataset,
analyze factors that affect performance, and highlight opportunities for future work