Shooting a smooth video with a shaky camera

Abstract. The image sequence in a video taken by a moving camera may suffer from irregular perturbations because of irregularities in the motion of the person or vehicle carrying the camera. We show how to use information in the image sequence to correct the effects of these irregularities so that the sequence is smoothed, i.e., is approximately the same as the sequence that would have been obtained if the motion of the camera had been smooth. Our method is based on the fact that the irregular motion is almost entirely rotational, and that the rotational image motion can be detected and corrected if a distant object, such as the horizon, is visible.