Real-time optical flow-based video stabilization for unmanned aerial vehicles

• DOI: 10.1007/s11554-017-0699-y
• Publication Date: 2017-06-14T10:23:40Z
• Authors: Anli Lim; Bharath Ramesh; Yue Yang; Cheng Xiang; Zhi Gao; Feng Lin
• Keywords: image stabilization; FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); digital video; Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; 02 engineering and technology; 01 natural sciences; 0104 chemical sciences; 629; XXXXXX - Unknown; drone aircraft; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; computer architecture

This paper describes the development of a novel algorithm to tackle the problem of real-time video stabilization for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). There are two main components in the algorithm: (1) By designing a suitable model for the global motion of UAV, the proposed algorithm avoids the necessity of estimating the most general motion model, projective transformation, and considers simpler motion models, such as rigid transformation and similarity transformation. (2) To achieve a high processing speed, optical-flow based tracking is employed in lieu of conventional tracking and matching methods used by state-of-the-art algorithms. These two new ideas resulted in a real-time stabilization algorithm, developed over two phases. Stage I considers processing the whole sequence of frames in the video while achieving an average processing speed of 50fps on several publicly available benchmark videos. Next, Stage II undertakes the task of real-time video stabilization using a multi-threading implementation of the algorithm designed in Stage I.<br/>Journal Paper<br/>