A Centroid Algorithm for Stabilization of Turbulence-Degraded Underwater Videos

This paper addresses the problem of stabilizing underwater videos with nonuniform geometric deformations or warping due to a wavy water surface. It presents an improved method to correct these geometric deformations of the frames, providing a high-quality stabilized video output. For this purpose, a non-rigid image registration technique is employed to accurately align the warped frames with respect to a prototype frame and to estimate the deformation parameters, which in turn, are applied in an image dewarping technique. The prototype frame is chosen from the video sequence based on a sharpness assessment. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by applying it on both synthetic and real-world sequences using various quality metrics. A performance comparison with an existing method confirms the higher efficacy of the proposed method.