Combining Internal and External Constraints for Unrolling Shutter in Videos


Eyal Naor, Itai Antebi, Shai Bagon, Michal Irani


[Paper PDF] [arXiv] [Code] [bibtex]


Abstract

Videos obtained by rolling-shutter (RS) cameras result in spatially-distorted frames. These distortions become significant under fast camera/scene motions. Undoing effects of RS is sometimes addressed as a spatial problem, where objects need to be rectified/displaced in order to generate their correct global shutter (GS) frame. However, the cause of the RS effect is inherently temporal, not spatial. In this paper we propose a space-time solution to the RS problem. We observe that despite the severe differences between their xy frames, a RS video and its corresponding GS video tend to share the exact same xt slices – up to a known sub-frame temporal shift. Moreover, they share the same distribution of small 2D xt-patches, despite the strong temporal aliasing within each video. This allows to constrain the GS output video using video-specific constraints imposed by the RS input video. Our algorithm is composed of 3 main components: (i) Dense temporal upsampling between consecutive RS frames using an off-the-shelf method, (which was trained on regular video sequences), from which we extract GS “proposals”. (ii) Learning to correctly merge an ensemble of such GS “proposals” using a dedicated MergeNet. (iii) A video-specific zero-shot optimization which imposes the similarity of xt-patches between the GS output video and the RS input video. Our method obtains state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets, both numerically and visually, despite being trained on a small synthetic RS/GS dataset. Moreover, it generalizes well to new complex RS videos with motion types outside the distribution of the training set (e.g., complex non-rigid motions) – videos which competing methods trained on much more data cannot handle well. We attribute these generalization capabilities to the combination of external and internal constraints.








RS input SUNet RSSR Ours Ground Truth GS

Examples of RS-induced distortions for various scene dynamics (and attempts to fix them).
SotA methods (SUNet, RSSR) fail to generalize to RS distortion types outside their
trainning set (especially non-rigid scenes), whereas our method does favorably.


Acknowledgments

This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) Horizon 2020, grant No 788535,
from the Carolito Stiftung and by grant from D. Dan and Betty Kahn Foundation.
Dr Bagon is a Robin Chemers Neustein AI Fellow.