Synchronized High-Speed Vision Sensor Network for Expansion of Field of View

We propose a 500-frames-per-second high-speed vision (HSV) sensor network that acquires frames at a timing that is precisely synchronized across the network. Multiple vision sensor nodes, individually comprising a camera and a PC, are connected via Ethernet for data transmission and for clock synchronization. A network of synchronized HSV sensors provides a significantly expanded field-of-view compared with that of each individual HSV sensor. In the proposed system, the shutter of each camera is controlled based on the clock of the PC locally provided inside the node, and the shutters are globally synchronized using the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) over the network. A theoretical analysis and experiment results indicate that the shutter trigger skew among the nodes is a few tens of microseconds at most, which is significantly smaller than the frame interval of 1000-fps-class high-speed cameras. Experimental results obtained with the proposed system comprising four nodes demonstrated the ability to capture the propagation of a small displacement along a large-scale structure.