Underwater Digital Image Stabilization Using Optical Flow Methods

This paper addresses the issue of irregular camera jitter caused by water flow impacts during underwater shaking table tests. A digital image stabilization method based on optical flow is proposed to mitigate this problem. The method consists of the following parts: (1) Segmentation of the moving background and foreground to identify the region to be stabilized; (2) Detection and tracking of target feature points within this region using optical flow for motion estimation; (3) Elimination of mismatched feature points using histogram-based thresholding; (4) Compensation of jitter vectors to generate a stabilized image sequence. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. Experimental results indicate that the method significantly reduces measurement errors caused by camera jitter, controlling the error at a sub-pixel level.