Enhancing low light images using near infrared flash images

Abstract

In low light environment, photographs taken with a high ISO setting suffer from significant noise. In this paper, we propose to use a near infrared (NIR) flash image, instead of a normal visible flash image, to enhance its corresponding noisy visible image. We build a hybrid camera system to take an visible image and its NIR counterpart simultaneously. We introduce a new method to denoise an visible image and enhance its details using its corresponding NIR flash image. Experimental results show the superiority of our method compared with previous image denoising and detail enhancement methods. © 2010 IEEE.