Fast Video Stabilization in the Compressed Domain

Video stabilization is an important technique in present day digital cameras as most of the cameras are hand-held, mounted on moving platforms or subjected to atmospheric vibrations. Motion estimation is a bottleneck in the stabilization pipeline as it consumes about 90% of the processing time. In this paper we propose to perform the stabilization task in the compressed domain using the motion information readily available in the compressed bit stream. The motion vector based global motion estimation technique is used to estimate the camera motion parameters from the block motion vectors. Smoothing of the motion parameters to retain the desired motion is performed using a gaussian filter followed by motion compensation to construct the stabilized frame. The focus of our work is on using the information in coded video streams to reduce the computational complexity and processing time. We compare the proposed scheme with existing pixel domain counterparts and show how it achieves speedup in processing time at the same time maintaining satisfactory stabilization performance.