A robust in-car digital image stabilization technique

Machine vision is a key technology used in an intelligent transportation system (ITS) to augment human drivers' visual capabilities. For the in-car applications, additional motion components are usually induced by disturbances such as the bumpy ride of the vehicle or the steering effect, and they will affect the image interpretation processes that is required by the motion field (motion vector) detection in the image. In this paper, a novel robust in-car digital image stabilization (DIS) technique is proposed to stably remove the unwanted shaking phenomena in the image sequences captured by in-car video cameras without the influence caused by moving object (front vehicles) in the image or intentional motion of the car, etc. In the motion estimation process, the representative point matching (RPM) module combined with the inverse triangle method is used to determine and extract reliable motion vectors in plain images that lack features or contain a large low-contrast area to increase the robustness in different imaging conditions, since most of the images captured by in-car video cameras include large low-contrast sky areas. An adaptive background evaluation model is developed to deal with irregular images that contain large moving objects (front vehicles) or a low-contrast area above the skyline. In the motion compensation processing, a compensating motion vector (CMV) estimation method with an inner feedback-loop integrator is proposed to stably remove the unwanted shaking phenomena in the images without losing the effective area of the images with a constant motion condition. The proposed DIS technique was applied to the on-road captured video sequences with various irregular conditions for performance demonstrations.