Strabismic imaging for correcting in-plane motion distortion in scanning imaging instruments and rolling shutter cameras

Images acquired with point-scanning instruments, line-scanning instruments, and rolling shutter cameras are distorted by motion of the instrument or the scene. This distortion arises from the sequential capture of pixels or rows of pixels and is known as the rolling shutter effect. Here, we demonstrate the correction of rolling shutter distortion caused by in-plane motion with a dual-imaging technique inspired by strabismus, an eye misalignment condition. When the velocity observed in pairs of synchronously captured and misaligned images can be considered constant within each image row or column, the distortion estimation problem can be formulated as a system of linear equations describing the displacement of image strips along the slow scanning direction or as an optimization problem that maximizes the similarity between the two distortion-corrected images. Both methods can be modified to correct motion distortion caused by in-plane rotation and scaling changes. Strabismic image pairs, acquired with a point-scanning instrument and a dual-rolling shutter camera setup, are used to demonstrate both approaches.