Through-the-Lens Multi-Camera Synchronisation and Frame-Drop Detection for 3D Reconstruction

Synchronisation is an essential requirement for multiview 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes. However, the use of HD cameras and large set-ups put a considerable stress on hardware and cause frame drops, which is usually detected by manually verifying very large amounts of data. This paper improves [9], and extends it with frame-drop detection capability. In order to spot frame-drop events, the algorithm fits a broken line to the frame index correspondences for each camera pair, and then fuses the pairwise drop hypotheses into a consistent, absolute frame-drop estimate. The success and the practical utility of the the improved pipeline is demonstrated through a number of experiments, including 3D reconstruction and free-viewpoint video rendering tasks.