Video Processing

Video Processing Fundamentals

Video is a sequence of image frames over time — \(I(x, y, t)\). Video processing extends image processing to the temporal domain, enabling motion analysis, temporal filtering, and dynamic scene manipulation.

Video Textures

Video textures create infinitely looping video by finding visually similar frames and creating seamless transitions:

  • Compute frame-to-frame similarity (e.g., sum of squared differences)

  • Build a transition cost matrix

  • Find low-cost transition points that allow seamless looping

  • Randomly sample transitions to create non-repeating, infinite-length video

Video Stabilization

Video stabilization removes unwanted camera shake while preserving intentional motion:

  • Estimate frame-to-frame camera motion (translation, rotation, affine)

  • Smooth the estimated motion trajectory (e.g., moving average, L1-optimal smoothing)

  • Apply corrective warps to each frame to follow the smoothed trajectory

  • Crop borders to remove artifacts from warping

Panoramic Video Textures

Combines panoramic stitching with video textures to create wide field-of-view looping video from panning camera footage.