Image sequence stabilization by low-pass filtering of interframe motion

An image sequence stabilization system that removes translational jitter while preserving intentional camera pan is presented. The video sequence is processed to acquire global camera translations from frame to frame (global interframe motion vectors) by motion estimation. The resulting motion vectors are accumulated to construct an absolute frame position vs. frame number signal. This signal is low-pass filtered to remove high frequency components caused by jitter, and retain low frequency parts representing the intentional camera pan. Correction vectors for image frames are obtained by subtracting the absolute frame position from the low-pass filtered value, and stabilization is achieved by the corresponding translation of image frames.