Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation

Information Technology
Information Technology
Robust, Efficient and Streamable Video Stabilization
WARF: P100230US01

Inventors: Michael Gleicher, Feng Liu, Hailin Jin, Jue Wang, Aseem Agarwala

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) is seeking commercial partners interested in developing a video stabilization technique that is robust and efficient yet provides high-quality results for a range of videos.
Overview
One of the most obvious differences between professional and amateur level video is the quality of camera motion. Hand-held amateur video typically is shaky and undirected, while professionals use careful planning and equipment to achieve directed motion.

Video stabilization is a widely used tool for improving casual video. Existing 2-D techniques are robust and fast but provide limited stabilization. On the other hand, existing 3-D techniques can provide high-quality motion but are so computationally intensive they essentially are limited to videos only a minute or so long.
The Invention
UW–Madison researchers have developed a robust and efficient approach to video stabilization that achieves high-quality camera motion for a wide range of videos. The key to this approach is that they enforce subspace constraints on feature trajectories while smoothing them. The method assembles tracked features in the video into a trajectory matrix, factors it into two low-rank matrices and performs filtering or curve fitting in a low-dimensional linear space. 
Applications
  • Stabilizing both amateur and professional video
Key Benefits
  • Combines the advantages of 2-D and 3-D video stabilization
  • Achieves high-quality video stabilization
  • Approach is efficient, robust and streamable.
  • Practical enough for consumer applications
  • Simpler than convention 3-D approaches
  • Provides smooth camera motions in cases where conventional approaches often fail, such as videos that lack parallax
  • May be performed in real time or near real time
  • May use linear approximations to bilinear optimizations for efficiency
  • Suitable for a wide range of videos
Additional Information
For More Information About the Inventors
Publications
  • Liu F., Gleicher M., Wang J., Jin H. and Agarwala A. 2011. Subspace Video Stabilization. ACM Trans. Graph. 30, 4:1-4:10.
  • Watch the demo video.
For current licensing status, please contact Jeanine Burmania at [javascript protected email address] or 608-960-9846

WARF