Semantically synchronizing multiple-camera systems with human pose estimation

Abstract

Multiple-camera systems can expand coverage and mitigate occlusion problems. However, temporal synchronization remains a problem for budget cameras and capture devices. We propose an out-of-the-box framework to temporally synchronize multiple cameras using semantic human pose estimation from the videos. Human pose predictions are obtained with an out-of-the-shelf pose estimator for each camera. Our method firstly calibrates each pair of cameras by minimizing an energy function related to epipolar distances. We also propose a simple yet effective multiple-person association algorithm across cameras and a score-regularized energy function for improved performance. Secondly, we integrate the synchronized camera pairs into a graph and derive the optimal temporal displacement configuration for the multiple-camera system. We evaluate our method on four public benchmark datasets and demonstrate robust sub-frame synchronization accuracy on all of them.