Digital video stabilization based on adaptive camera trajectory smoothing

Marcos R. Souza,Helio Pedrini

doi:10.1186/s13640-018-0277-7

Marcos R. Souza, Helio Pedrini

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13640-018-0277-7

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Abstract

The development of multimedia equipments has allowed a significant growth in the production of videos through professional and amateur cameras, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Examples of applications involving video processing and analysis include surveillance and security, telemedicine, entertainment, teaching, and robotics. Video stabilization refers to the set of techniques required to detect and correct glitches or instabilities caused during the video acquisition process due to vibrations and undesired motion when handling the camera. In this work, we propose and evaluate a novel approach to video stabilization based on an adaptive Gaussian filter to smooth the camera trajectories. Experiments conducted on several video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, which generates videos with adequate trade-off between stabilization rate and amount of frame pixels. Our results were compared to YouTube’s state-of-the-art method, achieving competitive results.

Highlights

The availability of new digital technologies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and the reduction of equipment costs have facilitated the generation of large volumes of videos in high resolutions
Video stabilization [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21] aims to correct camera motion oscillations that occur in the acquisition process, when the cameras are mobile and handled by amateurs
2 Background Different categories of stabilization approaches [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32] have been developed to improve the quality of videos, which can be broadly classified as mechanical stabilization, optical stabilization, and digital stabilization

Summary

Introduction

The availability of new digital technologies [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and the reduction of equipment costs have facilitated the generation of large volumes of videos in high resolutions. Several low-pass filters have been employed in the stabilization process [20, 22]. Their straightforward application using fixed intensity along all the videos is not suitable, since the camera motion may be unduly corrected when it should not. This work presents and evaluates a novel technique for video stabilization based on an adaptive Gaussian filter to smooth the camera trajectories. The results are compared to different versions of Gaussian filter, Kalman filter, and the video stabilization method employed in YouTube [24], which is considered a state-ofthe-art approach.

Background

Results and discussion

Conclusions