Temporal Calibration in Multisensor Tracking Setups

Abstract: Spatial tracking is one of the most challenging and important parts of mixed reality environments. Many applications, especially in the domain of Augmented Reality, rely on the fusion of several tracking systems in order to optimize the overall performance. While the topic of sensor fusion has already seen considerable interest, most results only deal with the integration of particular setups as opposed to dynamic sensor fusion setups. A crucial prerequisite for correct sensor fusion is the temporal alignment of the sensor signals, as sensors in general are not syn-chronized. We present a general method to calibrate the temporal offset between different sensors which can be used to perform on-line calibration. To show the correctness and the feasibility of this method, we evaluated various combinations of tracking sensors