Image Enhancement of Low-Light Scenes with Near-Infrared Flash Images

Abstract. We present a novel technique for enhancing an image cap-tured in low light by using near-infrared flash images. The main idea is to combine a color image with near-infrared flash images captured at the same time without causing any interference with the color image. In this work, near-infrared flash images are effectively used for removing annoy-ing effects that are commonly observed in images of dimly lit environ-ments, namely, image noise and motion blur. Our denoising method uses a pair of color and near-infrared flash images captured simultaneously. Therefore it is applicable to dynamic scenes, whereas existing methods assume stationary scenes and require a pair of flash and no-flash color images captured sequentially. Our deblurring method utilizes a set of near-infrared flash images captured during the exposure time of a single color image and directly acquires a motion blur kernel based on optical flow. We implemented a multispectral imaging system and confirmed the effectiveness of our technique through experiments using real images.