Motion tracking for realtime, offline image stabilization with limited hardware

Abstract

We present a work-in-progress system for tracking small objects with limited features to produce stabilized, successive images for frame-to-frame analysis in a specialized, hand-held, digital microscopy environment with limited resolution and processing capability and soft real-time requirements. Our system is able to track dirt or imperfections as small as about 10 μm across the end face of a fiber optic cable under a moving camera. It must locate three distinct features and track each of them from frame to frame. The measured positions of the features are used to calculate transformation matrices relative to a selected basis image and move each image in the image stack into the coordinate frame of the basis image so that we can perform focus stacking on the set of images. All of this must be completed in under a second on a low-power, hand-held device.