Simultaneous Video Stabilization and Rolling Shutter Removal

Due to the delay in the row-wise exposure and the lack of stable support when a photographer holds a CMOS camera, video jitter and rolling shutter distortion are closely coupled degradations in the captured videos. However, previous methods have rarely considered both phenomena and usually treat them separately, with stabilization approaches that are unable to handle the rolling shutter effect and rolling shutter removal algorithms that are incapable of addressing motion shake. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method that simultaneously stabilizes and rectifies a rolling shutter shaky video. The key issue is to estimate both inter-frame motion and intra-frame motion. Specifically, for each pair of adjacent frames, we first estimate a set of spatially variant inter-frame motions using a neighbor-motion-aware local motion model, where the classical mesh-based model is improved by introducing a new constraint to enhance the neighbor motion consistency. Then, different from other 2D rolling shutter removal methods that assume the pixels in the same row have a single intra-frame motion, we build a novel mesh-based intra-frame motion calculation model to cope with the depth variation in a mesh row and obtain more faithful estimation results. Finally, temporal and spatial motion constraints and an adaptive weight assignment strategy are considered together to generate the optimal warping transformations for different motion situations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.