Pixel-wise video stabilization

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel video stabilization method with a pixel-wise motion model. In order to avoid distortion introduced by traditional feature points based motion models, we focus on constructing a more accurate model to capture the motion in videos. By taking advantage of dense optical flow, we can obtain the dense motion field between adjacent frames and set up a pixel-wise motion model which is accurate enough. Our method first estimates dense motion field between adjacent frames. A PatchMatch based dense motion field estimation algorithm is proposed. This algorithm is specially designed for similar video frames rather than arbitrary images to reach higher speed and better performance. Then, a simple and fast smoothing algorithm is performed to make the jittered motion stabilized. After that, we warp input frames using a weighted average algorithm to construct the output frames. Some pixels in output frames may be still empty after the warping step, so in the last step, these empty pixels are filled using a patch based image completion algorithm. We test our method on many challenging videos and demonstrate the accuracy of our model and the effectiveness of our method.