Phase diffusion for the synchronization of heterogenous sensor streams

The analysis of complex human activity typically requires multiple sensors: cameras that take videos from different directions and in different areas, microphones, proximity sensors, range finders, and more. Scenarios where it is not possible to associate reliable clocks to each of the sensors pose a synchronization problem between heterogeneous data streams. In this paper, we propose a new theoretical framework for measuring the synchrony between heterogenous sensor streams. The main idea is to model the phase disparity between two data streams explicitly as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck random process. Based on this model, we derive a simple method for synchronizing of underlying sources. We illustrate the ideas with experiments on audio-visual synchronization and human motion categorization, and report promising results.