Frame Synchronization of Live Video Streams Using Visible Light Communication

With the growth of heterogeneous social media networks and the widespread use of camera-equipped handheld devices, interactive video broadcasting services are emerging on the Internet. When a media server combines and broadcasts live-streaming video contents received from heterogeneous camera equipped devices filming a common scene from different angles, the time-based alignment of the audio and video streams is required. Although many techniques and methods for video stream synchronization have been in use or proposed, these solutions are not suitable for a non-centralized multi-camera system consisting of for example heterogeneous camera-equipped smart phones. This paper proposes a novel approach by harnessing the capabilities of Visible Light Communication (VLC) to provide a robust and efficient way to synchronize video streams. This paper presents the design and implementation of a VLC-based video synchronization prototype. The synchronization of different video streams is provided by the means of VLC through Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights and digital phone cameras. This is achieved by embedding the necessary information as light patterns in the video content which can later be extracted by processing the video streams. The main benefit of our approach is the ability to use off-the-shelf cameras as it does not require any modification of software or hardware components in the camera devices. Moreover, the means of VLC can be exploited to carry other types of information such as position so that the receiver of the video stream can have a notion of the location in which the video was recorded.