Low Light Image Combining Using Python (1)

Low light images are photos taken while it is dark. Low light images are usually noisy since there is not enough light coming in. To reduce the noise, a commonly used way is to combine multiple images. For example, such a method has been used in Google pixel camera night mode. Here we will show a Python script which does simple low light image combining.

The pipeline includes three steps: raw image alignment, raw image combining, post processing.

Raw image is the direct output of the image sensor. In normal photo, each pixel has three color channels as R/G/B. But in raw image, each pixel only has one color channel. Bayer pattern is widely used in raw image, and it is also used in this experiment. The color pattern used here is shown below which is one kind of Bayer patterns. As one can see, out of 24 pixels, half of them are green, 25% is red and 25% is blue. The reason that green channel occupies the most pixels is because human eye is the most sensitive to green color.

   0 1 2 3 4 5
0 G R G R G R
1 B G B G B G
2 G R G R G R
3 B G B G B G

What raw image alignment does is to align two raw images. Since multiple images are taken at different times, due to hand movement, there will be small shift of the image. Without alignment, adding images together will create blurry photo. Our method for image alignment is straightforward. To align two images, we will divide both images to blocks with equal dimension. By calling one image "target" and the other image "candidate", we will swipe the candidate block through the target block in both x and y axis search directions. The scope of the swipe is called search range. For each swipe position, the L1 distance will be calculated which is the delta of the pixel values of the candidate and target blocks. Out of all swipe positions, the one with smallest L1 distance will be selected. For more details of this operation, you can refer to the Python source code here.

The reason that image alignment should be done at the very beginning of the image pipeline on raw image is for both performance and computation time. In term of performance, additional processing of the signal at the later stages such as interpolation/correlation may degrade the performance of alignment. In term of computation time, raw image has one color in a pixel but at later stages after interpolation, there will be three colors in each pixel. Calculating alignment on one color channel is faster than calculating that on three channels. Due to the structure of Bayer pattern, we only calculate candidate of even number of pixel shift such as 0/2/4 etc.

The step of raw image combining is to add candidate and target blocks together. Since they are already aligned, adding them together will enhance the signal while reducing the noise. Here we apply equal weight to each image. However, performance could be improved by applying different weights.

Between raw image and the photo we usually see, post processing needs to be done. Libraw library is used for post processing. The major steps of post processing is shown below:

Next we will show the outcome of combining. Raw images are obtained using Pro camera mode of a Samsung Galaxy S9 device. The camera settings are ISO = 800, 1/4 shutter speed, and F1.5. S9 has two aperture modes: F2.4 and F.15. F1.5 is a larger aperture for low light photo. Figure below shows the difference before (left) and after (right) the combining. The image quality is clearly improved. To get the right figure, we combine eight low light images. Bilateral filtering can be used to further enhance the image quality.

Source code of the Python script and raw image files can be found here: https://github.com/legendzhangn/blog/tree/master/lowlight_image_combine