Integration of Digital Stabilizer With Video Codec for Digital Video Cameras

This paper presents three novel schemes for integrating digital stabilizer with video codec of a digital video camera, each designed for a different application scenario. Scheme 1 confines the global motion estimation (ME) to within a small background region determined by clustering the motion vectors (MVs) generated by the video encoder. Scheme 2 performs the main ME task at the digital stabilizer and sends the resulting motion vectors to the video encoder, where the motion vectors are further refined to subpixel accuracy. Scheme 3, which is applied on the decoder side, acquires the motion information directly from the video decoder to perform digital stabilization. These integration schemes achieve computational efficiency without affecting the performance of video coding and digital stabilization.