Hardware-Free Event Cameras Temporal Synchronization Based on Event Density Alignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware-free method for synchronizing multiple event cameras by aligning their event density distributions, achieving less than 10ms synchronization error without additional circuitry.

Contribution

It proposes a novel timestamp adjustment approach based on event density alignment, applicable to cameras lacking hardware synchronization support.

Findings

Synchronization error less than 10ms across various camera models

Effective alignment of event density distributions for synchronization

No additional hardware required for synchronization

Abstract

Event cameras are a novel type of sensor designed for capturing the dynamic changes of a scene. Due to factors such as trigger and transmission delays, a time offset exists in the data collected by multiple event cameras, leading to inaccurate information fusion. Thus, the collected data needs to be synchronized to overcome any potential time offset issue. Hardware synchronization methods require additional circuits, while certain models of event cameras (e.g., CeleX5) do not support hardware synchronization. Therefore, this paper proposes a hardware-free event camera synchronization method. This method determines differences between start times by minimizing the dissimilarity of the event density distributions of different event cameras and synchronizes the data by adjusting timestamps. The experiments demonstrate that the method's synchronization error is less than 10ms under various senses with multiple models of event cameras.