A digital camcorder image stabilizer based on gray coded bit-plane block matching

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed an efficient algorithm to do image stabilization for digital camcorder. This approach is based on gray-coded bit-plane block matching to eliminate the unpleasing effect caused by involuntary movement of camera holders. To improve moving object detection and stabilization performance, a frame is divided into several blocks to do localized motion estimation. Based on our architecture, the temporal correlation is used at the motion unit to efficiently detect moving objects and panning conditions. To compensate for camera rotation, an energy minimization is also applied to calculate the coefficients of affine transform without many complicated computations. Having considered both programming flexibility and hardware efficiency, the motion decision and motion compensation units are coded in a microprocessor that interconnects with the stabilization hardware. The proposed stabilizer is now implemented on FPGA 10K 100.