Online Low-Light Sand-Dust Video Enhancement Using Adaptive Dynamic Brightness Correction and a Rolling Guidance Filter

Sand-dust videos obtained in a low-light environment are characterized by low contrast, nonuniform illumination, color cast, and considerable noise. To realize sand-dust removal and brightness enhancement simultaneously, this article proposes an online low-light sand-dust video enhancement method using adaptive dynamic brightness correction and a rolling guidance filter. The proposed dual-threshold interframe detection strategy involves two methods to treat low-light sand-dust video frames. The first method involves two components: an adaptive dynamic brightness correction algorithm to correct the color deviation of the low-light video frame and improve its brightness and a rolling guidance filter combined with guided image filtering to enhance the frame details. The second method enhances the quality of the incoming frame by reducing the amount of calculation. The first frame of the video is processed using the first method. The processing method of each subsequent frame is determined according to its interframe detection value with the buffer frame. Through qualitative and quantitative comprehensive experiments on low-light sand-dust images and videos, the performance of the proposed method is compared with those of state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method for frame quality improvement achieves the best visual effect in enhancing the quality of low-light sand-dust images, as indicated by the best objective evaluation indicators. Moreover, compared with the framewise enhancement method, the video processing efficiency associated with the dual threshold interframe detection strategy is 2.77 times higher.

Index Terms—Low-light sand-dust video, adaptive dynamic brightness correction, rolling guidance filter, dual-threshold interframe detection strategy.