Artifact-Free Low-Light Video Enhancement Using Temporal Similarity and Guide Map

Abstract

This paper presents a low-light video restoration algorithm using similar patches among temporally adjacent frames. The proposed artifact-free low-light video restoration algorithm consists of three steps: 1) brightness enhancement using similar patches among temporally adjacent frames and adaptive accumulation; 2) improved color assignment to reduce color distortion; and 3) image fusion for saturation reduction using the guide map. The proposed brightness enhancement step guarantees not to produce any undesired artifacts because of searching the most similar patches among given set of temporally adjacent frames. The color assignment and fusion steps enable a fully automatic color preservation and average brightness control. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can better restore high-quality videos without undesired artifacts such as noise amplification, flicker, color distortion, and brightness saturation. As a result, the proposed algorithm can be implemented in a wide range of digital imaging applications such as video surveillance systems and advanced driver assistance systems.