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Abstract:
Visual fixation is employed by humans and some animals to keep a specific 3D
location at the center of the visual gaze. Inspired by this phenomenon in
nature, this paper explores the idea to transfer this mechanism to the context
of video stabilization for a hand-held video camera. A novel approach is
presented that stabilizes a video by fixating on automatically extracted 3D
target points. This approach is different from existing automatic solutions
that stabilize the video by smoothing. To determine the 3D target points, the
recorded scene is analyzed with a state-of-the-art structure-from-motion
algorithm, which estimates camera motion and reconstructs a 3D point cloud of
the static scene objects. Special algorithms are presented that search either
virtual or real 3D target points, which back-project close to the center of the
image for as long a period of time as possible. The stabilization algorithm
then transforms the original images of the sequence so that these 3D target
points are kept exactly in the center of the image, which, in case of real 3D
target points, produces a perfectly stable result at the image center.
Furthermore, different methods of additional user interaction are investigated.
It is shown that the stabilization process can easily be controlled and that it
can be combined with state-of-the-art tracking techniques in order to obtain a
powerful image stabilization tool.
The approach is evaluated on a variety of videos taken with a hand-held camera
in natural scenes.
