Spiral search based fast rotation estimation for efficient HEVC compression of navigation video sequences

During the development and testing of navigation systems for modern cars, the video streams of the systems-under-test are carefully observed for errors of any kind. While this observation is typically carried out manually by software engineers monitoring the video output, the complexity and variety of the latest navigation systems demand an automated analysis of system functionality. Recently published work on automated error detection for navigation systems [1] can only enfold its full functionality if video sequences can be recorded and compressed in real-time, so that the full test program can be run under lab conditions after recording. However, the rotational motion of these sequences makes efficient compression a difficult task. In this paper, we present a fast and efficient method for rotation estimation, so that rotational motion compensation and thus efficient encoding can take place. Compared to existing state of the art approaches for SIFT- or SURF-based global motion estimation, our scheme requires 1/16th of the original processing time while providing almost identical quality gains of up to 2.5dB.