I have a series of images that change relatively little during the day, but suffer from severe over and underexposure sometimes. There's nothing I can do in the way of fixing the loss of details, however I want to make it so that one from to the next is not so jolting. In other words, I'd like to normalize brightness / color levels the sequence of images so that it feels more consistent from one from to the next. Ultimately this sequence is being encoded to a video and therefore why this is important to me.
How can I normalize these values for a series of a few hundred frames via ImageMagick or some other means?
Use ImageMagick command-line's -equalize option, that should do the trick. This will only adjust the current image to use its full color range properly.
If you want one image to match it's histogram and/or saturation to another, use this ImageMagick script.