In this paper, we address the problem of the restoration of image sequences which have been affected by local intensity modifications (local contrast changes). Such artifacts can be encountered in particular in biological or archive film sequences, and are usually due to inconsistent exposures or sparse time sampling. In order to reduce such local artifacts, we introduce a local stabilization operator, called $\LS$, which acts as a time filtering on image patches and relies on a similarity measure which is robust to contrast changes. Thereby, this operator is able to take motion into account without resting on a sophisticated motion estimation procedure. The efficiency of the stabilization is shown on various sequences. The experimental results compares favorably with state of the art approaches.