  Videos captured under low light conditions suffer from severe noise. A
variety of efforts have been devoted to image/video noise suppression and made
large progress. However, in extremely dark scenarios, extensive photon
starvation would hamper precise noise modeling. Instead, developing an imaging
system collecting more photons is a more effective way for high-quality video
capture under low illuminations. In this paper, we propose to build a
dual-sensor camera to additionally collect the photons in NIR wavelength, and
make use of the correlation between RGB and near-infrared (NIR) spectrum to
perform high-quality reconstruction from noisy dark video pairs. In hardware,
we build a compact dual-sensor camera capturing RGB and NIR videos
simultaneously. Computationally, we propose a dual-channel multi-frame
attention network (DCMAN) utilizing spatial-temporal-spectral priors to
reconstruct the low-light RGB and NIR videos. In addition, we build a
high-quality paired RGB and NIR video dataset, based on which the approach can
be applied to different sensors easily by training the DCMAN model with
simulated noisy input following a physical-process-based CMOS noise model. Both
experiments on synthetic and real videos validate the performance of this
compact dual-sensor camera design and the corresponding reconstruction
algorithm in dark videography.
