Highly accurate estimation of sub-pixel motion using phase correlation

Abstract

Motion estimation is one of the basic problems in digital video processing; it is significant in the applications of video image compression, super-resolution reconstruction, mosaic, and target detection, and so on. In the base of discussing usual phase correlation algorithm, we present an improved algorithm for the problem of highly accurate sub-pixel motion estimation, which introduces zero-padding for computing the initial estimate at sub-pixel level, and also adopts the method of paraboloid fitting phase correlation for refining the initial estimate. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only achieve good robustness to the influence of noise, but can also improve the accuracy of motion estimation significantly. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.