Frequency-domain loss function for deep exposure correction of dark images

We address the problem of exposure correction of dark, blurry and noisy images captured in low-light conditions in the wild. Classical image-denoising filters work well in the frequency space but are constrained by several factors such as the correct choice of thresholds and frequency estimates. On the other hand, traditional deep networks are trained end to end in the RGB space by formulating this task as an image translation problem. However, that is done without any explicit constraints on the inherent noise of the dark images and thus produces noisy and blurry outputs. To this end, we propose a DCT/FFT-based multi-scale loss function, which when combined with traditional losses, trains a network to translate the important features for visually pleasing output. Our loss function is end to end differentiable, scale-agnostic and generic; i.e., it can be applied to both RAW and JPEG images in most existing frameworks without additional overhead. Using this loss function, we report significant improvements over the state of the art using quantitative metrics and subjective tests.