A virtual tripod for hand-held video stacking on smartphones

We propose an algorithm that can capture sharp, low-noise images in low-light conditions on a hand-held smartphone. We make use of the recent ability to acquire bursts of high resolution images on high-end models such as the iPhone5s. Frames are aligned, or stacked, using rolling shutter correction, based on motion estimated from the built-in gyro sensors and image feature tracking. After stacking, the images may be combined, using e.g. averaging to produce a sharp, low-noise photo. We have tested the algorithm on a variety of different scenes, using several different smartphones. We compare our method to denoising, direct stacking, as well as a global-shutter based stacking, with favourable results.