Video alignment to a common reference

Handheld videos include unintentional motion (jitter) and often intentional motion (pan and/or zoom). Human viewers prefer to see jitter removed, creating a smoothly moving camera. For video analysis, in contrast, aligning to a fixed stable background is sometimes preferable. This paper presents an algorithm that removes both forms of motion using a novel and efficient way of tracking background points while ignoring moving foreground points. The approach is related to image mosaicing, but the result is a video rather than an enlarged still image. It is also related to multiple object tracking approaches, but simpler since moving objects need not be explicitly tracked. The algorithm presented takes as input a video and returns one or several stabilized videos. Videos are broken into parts when the algorithm detects the background changing and it becomes necessary to fix upon a new background. Our approach assumes the person holding the camera is standing in one place and that objects in motion do not dominate the image. Our algorithm performs better than several previously published approaches when compared on 1,401 handheld videos from the recently released Point-and-Shoot Face Recognition Challenge (PASC). The source code for this algorithm is being made available.