Synchronization and rolling shutter compensation for consumer video camera arrays

Two major obstacles to the use of consumer camcorders in computer vision applications are the lack of synchronization hardware, and the use of a "rolling" shutter, which introduces a temporal shear in the video volume. We present two simple approaches for solving both the rolling shutter shear and the synchronization problem at the same time. The first approach is based on strobe illumination, while the second employs a subframe warp along optical flow vectors. In our experiments we have used the proposed methods to effectively remove temporal shear, and synchronize up to 16 consumer-grade camcorders in multiple geometric configurations.