A New Robust Technique for Stabilizing Brightness Fluctuations in Image Sequences

Abstract

Temporal random variation of luminance in images can manifest in film and video due to a wide variety of sources. Typical in archived films, it also affects scenes recorded simultaneously with different cameras (e.g. for film special effect), and scenes affected by illumination problems. Many applications in Computer Vision and Image Processing that try to match images (e.g. for motion estimation, stereo vision, etc.) have to cope with this problem. The success of current techniques for dealing with this is limited by the non-linearity of severe distortion, the presence of motion and missing data (yielding outliers in the estimation process) and the lack of fast implementations in reconfigurable systems. This paper proposes a new process for stabilizing brightness fluctuations that improves the existing models. The article also introduces a new estimation method able to cope with outliers in the joint distribution of pairs images. The system implementation is based on the novel use of general purpose PC graphics hardware. The overall system presented here is able to deal with much more severe distortion than previously was the case, and in addition can operate at 7 fps on a 1.6GHz PC with broadcast standard definition images.