Robust and Real-Time Image Stabilization and Rectification

This paper presents a unified framework for achieving robust and real-time image stabilization and rectification. While compensating for a small amount of image jitter due to platform vibration and hand tremble is not a very difficult task, canceling a large amount of image jitter, due to significant, long-range, and purposeful camera motion (such as panning, zooming, and rotation), is much more challenging. Our framework selectively compensates for unwanted camera motion to maintain a stable view of the scene. The rectified display has the same information content, but is shown in a much more operator-friendly way. Our contribution is threefold: (1) proposing a unified image rectification algorithm to cancel large and purposeful image motion to achieve a stable display that is applicable for both far-field and near-field image conditions, (2) improving the robustness and real-time performance of these algorithms with extensive validation on real images, and (3) illustrating the potential of these algorithms by applying them to real-world problems in diverse application domains.