The ORB (Oriented fast and rotated brief, ORB) algorithm is limited by its inability to extract feature points or extract only a small number of feature points when a fixed threshold is used in complex lighting conditions. To address this issue, this study proposes a method that combines image enhancement with truncated adaptive threshold to improve the ORB feature extraction algorithm. Firstly, the original image is converted to grayscale. Secondly, the image is enhanced by applying Gaussian filtering for noise reduction, truncated adaptive gamma brightness adjustment, and unsharp masking operation. Then, the enhanced image is segmented into subregions of a specified size, and an improved truncated OTUS method is employed to calculate the adaptive threshold for each subregion. Finally, ORB feature points are extracted using the adaptive threshold. Experimental results show that the improved ORB algorithm can significantly increase the number of feature points in complex lighting conditions, with good accuracy, real-time performance, and robustness.