SteadyFlow: Spatially Smooth Optical Flow for Video Stabilization

Shuaicheng Liu, Lu Yuan, Ping Tan, Jian Sun; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 4209-4216

We propose a novel motion model, SteadyFlow, to represent the motion between neighboring video frames for stabilization. A SteadyFlow is a specific optical flow by enforcing strong spatial coherence, such that smoothing feature trajectories can be replaced by smoothing pixel profiles, which are motion vectors collected at the same pixel location in the SteadyFlow over time. In this way, we can avoid brittle feature tracking in a video stabilization system. Besides, SteadyFlow is a more general 2D motion model which can deal with spatially-variant motion. We initialize the SteadyFlow by optical flow and then discard discontinuous motions by a spatial-temporal analysis and fill in missing regions by motion completion. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our stabilization on real-world challenging videos.