Robust Video Stabilization by Optimization in CNN Weight Space

Jiyang Yu, Ravi Ramamoorthi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 3800-3808

We propose a novel robust video stabilization method. Unlike traditional video stabilization techniques that involve complex motion models, we directly model the appearance change of the frames as the dense optical flow field of consecutive frames. We introduce a new formulation of the video stabilization task based on first principles, which leads to a large scale non-convex problem. This problem is hard to solve, so previous optical flow based approaches have resorted to heuristics. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization routine that transfers this problem into the convolutional neural network parameter domain. While we exploit the general benefits of CNNs, including standard gradient-based optimization techniques, our method is a new approach to using CNNs purely as an optimizer rather than learning from data.Our method trains the CNN from scratch on each specific input example, and intentionally overfits the CNN parameters to produce the best result on the input example. By solving the problem in the CNN weight space rather than directly for image pixels, we make it a viable formulation for video stabilization. Our method produces both visually and quantitatively better results than previous work, and is robust in situations acknowledged as limitations in current state-of-the-art methods.