Fast global motion estimation and moving object extraction algorithm in image sequences

A novel and effective approach to global motion estimation and moving object extraction is proposed. First, the translational motion model is used because of the fact that complex motion can be decomposed as a sum of translational components. Then in this application, the edge gray horizontal and vertical projections are used as the block matching feature for the motion vectors estimation. The proposed algorithm reduces the motion estimation computations by calculating the onedimensional vectors rather than the two-dimensional ones. Once the global motion is robustly estimated, relatively stationary background can be almost completely eliminated through the inter-frame difference method. To achieve an accurate object extraction result, the higher-order statistics （HOS） algorithm is used to discriminate backgrounds and moving objects. Experimental results validate that the proposed method is an effective way for global motion estimation and object extraction.

Global motion estimation with Gabor wavelet transform

A novel algorithm of global motion estimation is proposed. First, through Gabor wavelet transform （GWT）, a kind of energy distribution of image is obtained and checkpoints are selected according to a probability decision approach proposed. Then, the initialized motion vectors are obtained via a hierarcbal block-matching based on these checkpoints. Finally, by employing a 3-parameter motion model, precise parameters of global motion are found. From the experiment, the algorithm is reliable and robust.

Electronic image stabilization system based on global feature tracking

A new robust electronic image stabilization system is presented, which involves feature-point, tracking based global motion estimation and Kalman filtering based motion compensation. First, global motion is estimated from the local motions of selected feature points. Considering the local moving objects or the inevitable mismatch, the matching validation, based on the stable relative distance between the points set is proposed, thus maintaining high accuracy and robustness. Next, the global motion parameters are accumulated for correction by Kalman filteration. The experimental result illustrates that the proposed system is effective to stabilize translational, rotational, and zooming jitter and robust to local motions.

A Two-Stage Algorithm of High Resolution Image Alignment for Mobile Applications

Global motion estimation (GME) algorithms are widely applied to computer vision and video processing. In the previous works, the image resolutions are usually low for the real-time requirement (e.g. video stabilization). However, in some mobile devices applications (e.g. image sequence panoramic stitching), the high resolution is necessary to obtain satisfactory quality of panoramic image. However, the computational cost will become too expensive to be suitable for the low power consumption requirement of mobile device. The full search algorithm can obtain the global minimum with extremely computational cost, while the typical fast algorithms may suffer from the local minimum problem. This paper proposed a fast algorithm to deal with 2560 × 1920 high-resolution (HR) image sequences. The proposed method estimates the motion vector by a two-level coarse-to-fine scheme which only exploits sparse reference blocks (25 blocks in this paper) in each level to determine the global motion vector, thus the computational costs are significantly decreased. In order to increase the effective search range and robustness, the predictive motion vector (PMV) technique is used in this work. By the comparisons of computational complexity, the proposed algorithm costs less addition operations than the typical Three-Step Search algorithm (TSS) for estimating the global motion of the HR images without the local minimum problem. The quantitative evaluations show that our method is comparable to the full search algorithm (FSA) which is considered to be the golden baseline.