Semantic Segmentation With Low Light Images by Modified CycleGAN-Based Image Enhancement

Abstract

In recent years, the importance of semantic segmentation has been widely recognized and the field has been actively studied. The existing state-of-the-art segmentation methods show high performance for bright and clear images. However, in low light or nighttime environments, images are blurred and noise increases due to the nature of the camera sensor, which makes it very difficult to perform segmentation for various objects. For this reason, there are few previous studies on multi-class segmentation in low light or nighttime environments. To address this challenge, we propose a modified cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN)-based multi-class segmentation method that improves multi-class segmentation performance for low light images. In this study, we used low light databases generated by two road scene open databases that provide segmentation labels, which are the Cambridge-driving labeled video database (CamVid) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (KITTI) database. Consequently, the proposed method showed superior segmentation performance compared with the other state-of-the-art methods.