A Single-frame Visual Gyroscope

Rapid camera rotations (e.g. camera shake) are a significant problem when real-time computer vision algorithms are applied to video from a handheld or head-mounted camera. Such camera motions cause image features to move large distances in the image and cause significant motion blur. Here we propose a very fast method of estimating the camera rotation from a single frame which does not require any detection, matching or extraction of feature points and can be used as a motion estimator to reduce the search range for feature matching algorithms that may be subsequently applied to the image. This method exploits the motion blur in the frame, using features which remain sharp to rapidly compute the axis of rotation of the camera, and using blurred features to estimate the magnitude of the camera’s rotation.