Determining the Time Delay Between Inertial and Visual Sensor Measurements

Jonathan Kelly, Nicholas Roy, Gaurav S. Sukhatme

Abstract: We examine the problem of determining the relative time delay between IMU and camera data streams. The primary difficulty is that the correspondences between measurements from the sensors are not initially known, and hence, the time delay cannot be computed directly. We instead formulate time delay calibration as a registration problem, and introduce a calibration algorithm that operates by aligning curves in a three-dimensional orientation space. Results from simulation studies and from experiments with real hardware demonstrate that the delay can be accurately calibrated.