Method of Motion Estimation for Image Stabilization

In this paper we introduce a novel approach to global motion estimation for image stabilization application. The method is robust to image degradations characteristic to image stabilization, e.g. image blur caused by motion or out of focus. In addition, due to its low computational complexity, the proposed method could be included in a real-time digital image stabilization system. The ability of the proposed registration approach to capture the global motion of the camera in the presence of image degradations and outliers, have been evaluated through a large number of experiments. The results reveal that, in spite of its lower computational complexity, the proposed method achieves sub-pixel motion estimation accuracy, close to the performance achieved by the state of the art approaches to image registration