An electronic video camera image stabilizer operated on fuzzy theory

An electronic video camera image stabilizer was developed. It eliminates a substantial part of the image instability caused by the involuntary movement of camera holders. The discrimination between image movement caused by unstable hand-holding and that of moving objects becomes possible by developing the following process: (1) dividing the image taken by the camera into four regions, (2) providing two signals to discriminate between the causes of image instability, (3) evaluating these two discriminating signals after they are transformed into reliability values by membership functions, and (4) tuning the membership functions using a simplex method. This image stabilizer was incorporated into a compact video camera and its substantially improved field performance was confirmed