Digital image stabilization and its integration with video encoder

Digital image stabilizer and video encoder are two important components of a digital video camera. The digital image stabilizer compensates the image movement caused by hand jiggles and thereby improves the perceptual quality of the captured image sequence, while the video encoder compresses the huge amount of video data down to a reasonable size. Both components require the motion information of the image sequence to perform their respective tasks. Since motion estimation is a computation intensive operation, we present an integration scheme for integrating the digital image stabilizer with the video encoder. The image stabilization algorithms and the technical issues involved in the integration are discussed. Simulation results are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed digital image stabilization system.