This paper presents a method for robustly stabilising omnidirectional video given the presence of significant rotations and translations by creating a virtual camera and using a combination of sensor fusion and scene tracking. Real time rotational movements of the camera are measured by an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which provides an initial estimate of the ego-motion of the camera platform. Image registration is then used to refine these estimates. The calculated ego-motion is then used to adjust an extract of the omnidirectional video, forming a virtual camera that is focused on the scene. Experiments show the technique is effective under challenging ego-motions and overcomes deficiencies that are associated with unimodal approaches making it robust and suitable to be used in many surveillance applications.

Non-rigid registration is central to many problems in computer vision and medical image analysis. We propose a registration algorithm which is regularized by prior knowledge in the form of a statistical deformation model. This model is obtained from previous registrations performed on a set of noise-free training examples given by images, or shapes represented by level set functions. Contrary to similar approaches, our method does not strictly constrain the result to lie in the span of the statistical model but rather uses the model for Tikhonov regularization. Therefore, our method can be used to reduce the influence of noise and artifacts even when the model contains only a few typical examples. This automatically gives rise to a bootstrapping strategy for building statistical models from noisy data sets requiring only a limited number of high quality examples. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on synthetic and medical images.

Scaling of the bit size in conventional magnetic recording media is becoming increasingly difficult due to the superparamagnetic limit. Innovations in magnetic recording technology are emerging to enable the continued growth in bit areal density. Thermal stability problems of conventional granular media can be greatly helped by patterning single domain magnetic islands for each magnetic bit. Fabrication of patterned media requires application of nanoimprint lithography for high-volume production of patterned media disks and high-resolution electron beam lithography for fabrication of the nanoimprint masters. We discuss the approaches and the many challenges to the implementation of patterned media disks.