Rolling Shutter Inversion: Bring Rolling Shutter Images to High Framerate Global Shutter Video

A single rolling-shutter (RS) image may be viewed as a row-wise combination of a sequence of global-shutter (GS) images captured by a (virtual) moving GS camera within the exposure duration. Although rolling-shutter cameras are widely used, the RS effect causes obvious image distortion especially in the presence of fast camera motion, hindering downstream computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose to invert the rolling-shutter image capture mechanism, i.e., recovering a continuous high framerate global-shutter video from two time-consecutive RS frames. We call this task the RS temporal super-resolution (RSSR) problem. The RSSR is a very challenging task, and to our knowledge, no practical solution exists to date. This paper presents a novel deep-learning based solution. By leveraging the multi-view geometry relationship of the RS imaging process, our learning based framework successfully achieves high framerate GS generation. Specifically, three novel contributions can be identified: (i) novel formulations for bidirectional RS undistortion flows under constant velocity as well as constant acceleration motion model. (ii) a simple linear scaling operation, which bridges the RS undistortion flow and regular optical flow. (iii) a new mutual conversion scheme between varying RS undistortion flows that correspond to different scanlines. Our method also exploits the underlying spatial-temporal geometric relationships within a deep learning framework, where no additional supervision is required beyond the necessary middle-scanline GS image. Building upon these contributions, this paper represents the very first rolling-shutter temporal super-resolution deep-network that is able to recover high framerate global-shutter videos from just two RS frames. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real data show that our proposed method can produce high-quality GS image sequences with rich details, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.