Image stabilization for moving platform surveillance

Abstract

Line of sight jitter degrades the image/real time video quality of a high performance sighting system, resulting in reduced detection/recognition/identification ranges. Line of sight jitter results from residual dynamics on the sighting system from the host platform. A scheme for fine image/video stabilization, in presence of high magnitude line of sight jitter, has been presented in this paper. The proposed scheme is a combination of conventional gyro stabilization of payload line of sight (i.e. Mechanical Image Stabilization-MIS) and Digital Image Stabilization (DIS). Gyro stabilization technique is used to minimize the computation requirement of DIS technique. The proposed technique has been implemented and evaluated using standard hardware (SMT8039). Inclusion of DIS algorithms has given an additional disturbance isolation of at least 10 dB in our experiments, while image smoothness index also improved by a factor of four or more. The proposed method also indicated that higher image smoothness and disturbance isolation are possible at comparatively higher frequencies (limited by computation capability of the computing platform).