Multiple Sensor Synchronization with theRealSense RGB-D Camera

When reconstructing a 3D object, it is difficult to obtain accurate 3D geometric information using a single camera. In order to capture detailed geometric information of a 3D object, it is inevitable to increase the number of cameras to capture the object. However, cameras need to be synchronized in order to simultaneously capture frames. If cameras are incorrectly synchronized, many artifacts are produced in the reconstructed 3D object. The RealSense RGB-D camera, which is commonly used for obtaining geometric information of a 3D object, provides synchronization modes to mitigate synchronization errors. However, the synchronization modes provided by theRealSense cameras can only sync depth cameras and have limitations in the number of cameras that can be synchronized using a single host due to the hardware issue of stable data transmission. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel synchronization method that synchronizes an arbitrary number of RealSense cameras by adjusting the number of hosts to support stable data transmission. Our method establishes a master–slave architecture in order to synchronize the system clocks of the hosts. While synchronizing the system clocks, delays that resulted from the process of synchronization were estimated so that the difference between the system clocks could be minimized. Through synchronization of the system clocks, cameras connected to the different hosts can be synchronized based on the timestamp of the data received by the hosts. Thus, our method synchronizes theRealSense cameras to simultaneously capture accurate 3D information of an object at a constant frame rate without dropping it.