Synchronization Detection of Multicamera System Based on LED Matrix

In a nonsynchronous multicamera system, cameras start to capture pictures at different time. To synchronize cameras, we should know the capture time of each camera and adjust them according to the time. We propose a high precision method to detect the synchronization accuracy by using a FPGA based LED matrix as a detector. The LEDs in the matrix are encoded basing on the carry-flowing encoding (CFE) method, so the matrix displays a sequence of different LEDs combination states. When the cameras capture an image of the detector, the state of LED matrix in the image and the capture time that it represents can be determined. According to the capture time, we can detect the relative time interval between cameras, adjust them on account of the interval, and finally synchronize all the cameras. A four-camera synchronization system is setup to verify this method. Experiment results show that the detection of the synchronization accuracy can be less than 1ms. The proposed multicamera detection method is simple and easy to use, it can be applied to most of the multicamera systems.