A Feedback-Based Robust Video Stabilization Method for Traffic Videos

Abstract

Traffic videos are often recorded by vehicle-mounted cameras. Compared with videos recorded by handheld cameras, traffic videos suffer from more challenges, such as higher frequency and more violent jitters, dynamic scenes, large moving objects, and parallax, which can result in significant visual quality degradation. To address these challenges for traffic videos, we propose a special stabilization method. The key aspect of our method is a feedback strategy that divides the extracted feature trajectories into background trajectories and foreground trajectories by feeding back the previous trajectory classification results. The method can perform robustly, even in the case of large moving objects and parallax. Furthermore, our method maintains the number of available background trajectories within a reasonable range via two refinement strategies. One strategy attempts to reliably recover background trajectories from misjudged foreground trajectories when there are an insufficient number of background trajectories. The other strategy can adaptively adjust the number of feature points in each frame to efficiently avoid too many or too few background trajectories. With the obtained background trajectories, a homography matrix between each frame and its stabilized view is computed and implemented to warp the frame image to produce smooth videos. Experimental results confirm that our method is both effective in stabilizing traffic videos and quite robust against large moving objects and parallax.