Adaptively Meshed Video Stabilization

Abstract: Video stabilization is essential for improving visual quality of shaky videos. The current video stabilization methods usually take feature trajectories in the background to estimate one global transformation matrix or several transformation matrices based on a fixed mesh, and warp shaky frames into their stabilized views. However, these methods may not model the shaky camera motion well in complicated scenes, such as scenes containing large foreground objects or strong parallax, and may result in notable visual artifacts in the stabilized videos. To resolve the above issues, this paper proposes an adaptively meshed method to stabilize a shaky video based on all of its feature trajectories and an adaptive blocking strategy. More specifically, we first extract feature trajectories of the shaky video and then generate a triangle mesh according to the distribution of the feature trajectories in each frame. Then transformations between shaky frames and their stabilized views over all triangular grids of the mesh are calculated to stabilize the shaky video. Since more feature trajectories can usually be extracted from all regions, including both background and foreground regions, a finer mesh will be obtained and provided for camera motion estimation and frame warping. We estimate the mesh-based transformations of each frame by solving a two-stage optimization problem. Moreover, foreground and background feature trajectories are no longer distinguished and both contribute to the estimation of the camera motion in the proposed optimization problem, which yields better estimation performance than previous works, particularly in challenging videos with large foreground objects or strong parallax.