High-precision synchronization of video cameras using a single binary light source

Light Source Qi Zhao1 and Yan Qiu Chen2, ∗ 1School of Information Science and Engineering, Fudan University, Shanghai, China 2School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China Abstract Camera synchronization is necessary for multi-camera applications. In this paper, we propose a simple and yet effective approach termed Random On-Off Light Source (ROOLS ) to synchronize video sequences. It uses a single light source such as an LED to generate a random binary valued signal which is captured by the video cameras. The captured binary valued sequences are then matched and the temporal offset of the cameras is computed up to sub-frame interval precision. We have tested the proposed method on synchronizing video sequences captured under a variety of illumination conditions and the results are verified against the ground truth provided by an LED array clock. The main contribution of the proposed method is that it reliably achieves high precision synchronization at a low cost of only adding a simple light source. In addition, it is suited for synchronization in both laboratory and outdoor environments.