Fast and accurate global motion estimation algorithm using pixel subsampling

Global motion generally describes the motion of a camera, although it may comprise motions of large objects. Global motions are often modeled by parametric transformations of two-dimensional images. The process of estimating the motions parameters is called global motion estimation (GME). GME is widely employed in many applications such as video coding, image stabilization and super-resolution. To estimate global motion parameters, the Levenburg–Marquardt algorithm (LMA) is typically used to minimize an objective function iteratively. Since the region of support for the global motion representation consists of the entire image frame, the minimization process tends to be very expensive computationally by involving all the pixels within an image frame. In order to significantly reduce the computational complexity of the LMA, we proposed to select only a small subset of the pixels for estimating the motion parameters, based on several subsampling patterns and their combinations. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed method could speed up the conventional GME approach by over ten times, with only a very slight loss (less than 0.1 dB) in estimation accuracy. The proposed method was also found to outperform several state-of-the-art fast GME methods in terms of the speed/accuracy tradeoffs.