Diffusion Model Based Low-Light Image Enhancement for Space Satellite

Space-based visible camera is an important sensor for space situation awareness during proximity operations. However, visible camera can be easily affected by the low illumination in the space environment. Recently, deep learning approaches have achieved remarkable success in image enhancement of natural images datasets, but seldom applied in space due to the data bottleneck. In this article, we propose a data-driven method for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) of spin targets in space environment based on diffusion model. Firstly, a dataset collection scheme is devised. To reduce the domain gap and improve the diversity and quality of the dataset, we collect the data with the camera on a ground-test system imitating the low lighting conditions and relative attitude change of satellite in space. The satellite motion is controlled by a 6-DoF robot. To generate different poses, a advanced sampling method is combined with collision detection in physical simulation. The entire process is automated. Based on our dataset, a novel diffusion model is proposed. The diffusion and denoising process are directly conducted on the grayscale channel to save computational resources. To take advantage of the inner information of RGB channels, we rescale the RGB feature maps and insert them into the downsampling layers to help feature extraction. The enhanced results with our method have been verified to be better in image light enhancement and competitive in image quality compared with previous methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of LLIE using diffusion model.