Online Digital Image Stabilization for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
Abstract
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) video system uses a portable camera mounted on the robot to monitor scene activities. In general, UAVs have very little stabilization equipment, so getting good and stable images of UAVs in real-time is still a challenge. This paper presents a novel framework for digital image stabilization for online applications using a UAV. This idea aims to solve the problem of unwanted vibration and motion when recording video using a UAV. The proposed method is based on dense optical flow to select features representing the displacement of two consecutive frames. K-means clustering is used to find the cluster of the motion vector field that has the largest members. The centroid of the largest cluster was chosen to estimate the rigid transform motion that handles rotation and translation. Then, the trajectory is compensated using the Kalman filter. The experimental results show that the proposed method is suitable for online video stabilization and achieves an average computation time performance of 47.5 frames per second (fps).
Moraref