Digital Video Stabilisation in modern and next generation imaging systems

Digital video stabilisation allows to remove unwanted camera movements producing video sequences without disturbing jerkiness. In this paper we propose a novel fast global motion estimation algorithm for video stabilisation based on block matching of local motion vectors. Some of these vectors are properly filtered out by making use of ad-hoc rules taking into account local similarity, local "activity" and matching effectiveness. Also a temporal analysis of the relative error computed at each frame has been introduced. Reliable information is then used to retrieve inter-frame transformation parameters which are used to remove jerkiness. Experiments on real cases confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach even in critical conditions.