Instantaneous video stabilization for unmanned aerial vehicles

摘要

Video stabilization is a critical step for improving the quality of videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the complicated scenarios in the video and the need for instantaneously presenting a stabilized image posed significant challenges to the existing methods. In this work, an instantaneous video stabilization method for unmanned aerial vehicles is proposed. This new approach serves several purposes: smoothing the video motion in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3-D) scenes, decreasing the lags in response, and instantaneously providing the stabilized image to users. For each input frame, our approach regenerates four short motion trajectories by applying interframe transformations to the four corners of the image rectangle. An adaptive filter is then performed to smooth motion trajectories and suppress the lags in response simultaneously. Finally, at the stage of image composition, the quality of image is considered for selecting a visually plausible stabilized video. Experiments show that our approach can stabilize various videos without the need for user interaction or costly 3-D reconstruction, and it works as an instant-process for videos from an online source.