Abstract: In order to improve the visual quality of low-light image,a kind of low-light image enhancement method based on directional total variation Retinex was proposed.Firstly,the true scene color of low-light image was restored by grey pixels-based color constancy pretreatment.And then,the directional relative total variation constraint was constructed,so as to estimate the illumination map.In order to suppress the amplification of noise and artifact during the enhancement procedure,the directional gradient residual minimization constraint was used to calculate the reflection map.Finally,considering the relationship between the current pixel’s brightness and its neighboring pixels’average brightness,the final enhancement image was obtained by stretching the local brightness.Numerous experiments on various low-light images collected from Internet demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain more pleasing results compared with the state-of-the-art methods.