Video stabilization using maximally stable extremal region features

Video stabilization is an important technique in present day digital cameras as most of the cameras are hand-held, mounted on moving platforms or subjected to atmospheric vibrations. In this paper we propose a novel video stabilization scheme based on estimating the camera motion using maximally stable extremal region features. These features traditionally used in wide baseline stereo problems were never explored for video stabilization purposes. Through our extensive experiments show we how some properties of these region features are suitable for the stabilization task. After estimating the global camera motion parameters using these region features, we smooth the motion parameters using a gaussian filter to retain the desired motion. Finally, motion compensation is carried out to obtain a stabilized video sequence. A number of examples on real and synthetic videos demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We compare our results to existing techniques and show how our proposed approach compares favorably to them. Interframe Transformation Fidelity is used for objective evaluation of our proposed approach.