You might get the results you are looking for with detail enhancement filters, using a large filter radius. A popular example of detail enhancement is the "Clarity" effect in Adobe Lightroom. What these algorithms do actually amounts to increasing contrast locally.
The Guided Filter can be used for detail enhancement (see page 10 of the linked paper), and it may be sufficiently fast for video, in contrast to the better known Bilateral Filter. It is also relatively easy to implement, at least for grayscale images or for per-channel operation. Matlab code for experimenting is here, it contains a detail enhancement example, if I recall correctly.
Theory: Roughly, the idea is to add a high-pass filtered version of the image to the original image. If you do this with a small high-pass kernel you do sharpening, if you use a large kernel (letting through more frequencies) you do detail enhancement. The Guided Filter is a clever method of avoiding halo artifacts which occur at sharp light-to-dark boundaries when you approach the problem with simple high-pass filters.