Sub-millisecond Video Synchronization of Multiple Android Smartphones
This provides an accessible solution for computer vision and robotics applications requiring precise multi-view synchronization, though it is incremental as it adapts existing smartphone technology for this specific use case.
The paper tackles the need for an affordable and easy-to-setup synchronized multi-view camera system by developing a publicly-available Android app that achieves sub-millisecond video synchronization accuracy across multiple smartphones, with time drift less than 1.2 msec per minute for most devices.
This paper addresses the problem of building an affordable easy-to-setup synchronized multi-view camera system, which is in demand for many Computer Vision and Robotics applications in high-dynamic environments. In our work, we propose a solution for this problem -- a publicly-available Android application for synchronized video recording on multiple smartphones with sub-millisecond accuracy. We present a generalized mathematical model of timestamping for Android smartphones and prove its applicability on 47 different physical devices. Also, we estimate the time drift parameter for those smartphones, which is less than 1.2 msec per minute for most of the considered devices, that makes smartphones' camera system a worthy analog for professional multi-view systems. Finally, we demonstrate Android-app performance on the camera system built from Android smartphones quantitatively on setup with lights and qualitatively -- on panorama stitching task.