Temporal synchronization in multi-sensor fusion for future driver assistance systems

A new approach to precise timestamping and temporal synchronization in a multi-sensor setup is presented. Modern driver assistance systems use an increasing amount of different sensors that do not provide the exact timestamps of the measurements, nor the period of time between two measurements. This paper describes a method to determine these timestamps up to millisecond accuracy. Possible drifts of the internal sensor clocks are taken into account. In addition, a frequent problem are lost measurements that lead to large errors in the timestamping. These framedrops are detected reliably and handled adequately via the method at hand. Finally a method to evaluate the performance of the whole timestamping procedure is described and real-world results are presented.