A new approach for very dark video denoising and enhancement

The paper presents a novel three-stage algorithm for very-low-light video denoising and enhancement. The proposed technique invokes twice, in the first and the third stages, the well-known Non-Local Means (NLM) method for spatial and temporal denoising: it is well adapted to the application, leading to the definition of a novel NLM tool. The intermediate stage performs a custom tone adjustment specifically aimed at enlarging the dynamic range of very dark videos. The overall approach transforms very dark videos into more watchable ones, effectively reduces very high noise, and all in all, produces high quality restored image sequences outperforming the recent state-of-the-art results. Additionally, the first and third stages can be combined as a two-step filtering scheme for normal-light videos: the novel denoising solution achieves a heavy noise removal, while reducing motion blur artifacts and preserving image details.