Visual rhythms for qualitative evaluation of video stabilization

Marcos Roberto e Souza, Hélio Pedrini

Abstract: Recent technological advances have enabled the development of compact and portable cameras for the generation of large volumes of video content. Several applications have benefited from such significant growth of multimedia data, such as telemedicine, surveillance and security, entertainment, teaching, and robotics. However, videos captured by amateurs are subject to unwanted motion or vibration while handling the camera. Video stabilization techniques aim to detect and remove glitches or instabilities caused during the acquisition process to enhance visual quality. In this work, we introduce and analyze a novel representation based on visual rhythms for qualitative evaluation of video stabilization methods. Experiments conducted on different video sequences are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the visual representation as qualitative measure for evaluating video stability. In addition, we present a proposal to calculate an objective metric extracted from the visual rhythms.