Stabilo Optimize

Stabilo-Optimize is a Python benchmarking tool designed specifically to evaluate and tune methods and hyperparameters of the Stabilo 🌀 library for video and track stabilization tasks. It systematically generates performance evaluations through random perturbations, eliminating the need for ground-truth homographies. This tool significantly simplifies the optimization of stabilization techniques, making it ideal for high-precision tasks in fields such as urban monitoring, traffic analysis, and drone imagery processing.

Why Stabilo-Optimize

• Ground Truth-Free Benchmarking: Randomly generates photometric and homographic perturbations (brightness variations, Gaussian blur, saturation adjustments, fog effects, rotations, translations, scales, and perspective shifts).
• Hierarchical Benchmarking Strategy: Encourages users to systematically vary hyperparameters hierarchically for efficient parameter optimization.
• Flexible JSON Configuration: Customize extensive parameter settings using nested dictionaries (see comprehensive_benchmark.json or simple_benchmark.json for examples).
• Result Visualization: Generates comprehensive performance plots and benchmarking process visualizations.

Install

Create and activate a Python virtual environment (Python 3.9–3.13), then install from PyPI:

python3.11 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install stabilo-optimize

Also works with uv (uv pip install stabilo-optimize) and conda.

For development, clone the repository and install in editable mode with the dev extra:

git clone https://github.com/rfonod/stabilo-optimize.git
cd stabilo-optimize && pip install -e '.[dev]'

Quick Start

A sample benchmark (simple_benchmark.json) with provided scenes and vehicle bounding box masks is included in the experiments/sample_experiment directory. To reproduce the results, run:

stabilo-optimize benchmark experiments/sample_experiment/simple_benchmark.json -sp -sv -o

• -sp: Save performance plots.
• -sv: Save benchmark visualization video.
• -o: Overwrite previous results.

Add -l <path>/--log-file <path> (also available on plot) to additionally write console output to a file — parent directories are created automatically, color codes are stripped in the file, the resolved absolute path is printed to the console, and log files are gitignored (*.log) by default.

-v/--verbosity (benchmark only) controls how much detail is printed, including from Stabilo's own internal logging: 0=quiet (top-level status only, Stabilo's own messages fully suppressed), 1=minimal (+ per-run header/summary table, Stabilo errors only), 2=detailed (+ per-scene summary table, Stabilo warnings and up), 3=debug (+ per-trial output, Stabilo info and up).

Use stabilo-optimize benchmark --help to explore additional command-line options, or re-plot existing results without re-running the benchmark:

stabilo-optimize plot experiments/sample_experiment/simple_benchmark.json

Note: This example is limited to three scenes for demonstration purposes. Users should define their own benchmarks with a more representative selection of scenes for meaningful evaluation.

Custom Benchmarking

To set up your own benchmark, create a new experiment directory within experiments containing:

• benchmark.json: Configuration specifying methods/hyperparameters and number of random trials (N) per scene. For reliable results, set N > 100.
• scenes: Directory containing input images (and optional exclusion masks in YOLO format). Ensure selected scenes adequately represent your stabilization tasks. To obtain reliable benchmarking results, include a diverse set of scenes covering different lighting conditions and camera viewpoints.

Example structure:

experiments
└─custom_experiment
  ├─benchmark.json
  └─scenes
    ├ image1.jpg
    ├ image1.txt
    ├ image2.jpg
    ├ image2.txt
    ├ ...

Note: A comprehensive configuration file (comprehensive_benchmark.json) is included for illustration purposes. Due to computational costs, users should avoid directly running such an extensive parameter search. Instead, adopt a hierarchical parameter search approach by fixing some hyperparameters and varying others.

Refer to the Stabilo 🚀 library and the associated article for detailed descriptions of available methods and hyperparameters.

GPU acceleration: setting gpu: true in the config runs (parts of) Stabilo's pipeline on an NVIDIA GPU — see docs/cuda.md in the Stabilo repo for building a CUDA-enabled OpenCV and setting it up. This mainly affects Computation_time, not tuning outcomes: RANSAC-based homography/affine estimation always runs on CPU, so the HEA/MIoU accuracy metrics are essentially unaffected by this setting.

Benchmarking Metrics

Benchmarks use metrics like Homography Estimation Accuracy (HEA) and Mean Intersection over Union (MIoU). MIoU specifically evaluates the accuracy of object-level registration and requires bounding box masks for calculation. Detailed metric definitions and analysis are provided in the manuscript.

Citation

If you use Stabilo-Optimize in your research, software, or product, please cite the following resources appropriately:

1. Preferred Citation: Please cite the associated article for any use of the Stabilo-Optimize, including research, applications, and derivative work:

   @article{fonod2025advanced,
     title = {Advanced computer vision for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from drone imagery},
     author = {Fonod, Robert and Cho, Haechan and Yeo, Hwasoo and Geroliminis, Nikolas},
     journal = {Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies},
     volume = {178},
     pages = {105205},
     year = {2025},
     publisher = {Elsevier},
     doi = {10.1016/j.trc.2025.105205},
     url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2025.105205}
   }

2. Repository Citation: If you reference, modify, or build upon the Stabilo-Optimize software itself, please also cite the corresponding Zenodo release:

   @software{fonod2026stabilo-optimize,
     author = {Fonod, Robert},
     license = {MIT},
     month = jul,
     title = {Stabilo Optimize: A Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation and Analysis for the Stabilo Library},
     url = {https://github.com/rfonod/stabilo-optimize},
     doi = {10.5281/zenodo.13828430},
     version = {1.1.0},
     year = {2026}
   }

Contributing

Contributions from the community are welcome! If you encounter any issues or have suggestions for improvements, please open a GitHub Issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is distributed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.