This paper presents a new approach to exact timestamping of asynchronous measurements in a multi-sensor setup. In order to improve the performance of a single sensor, driver assistance systems use several different sensors which have different latencies that usually cannot be measured directly. These unknown latencies pose a problem in data association and temporal synchronization. Consequently, a method to estimate or incorporate the latencies is needed in all sensor fusion algorithms in order to derive the real time of a measurement. In this paper a method is described to compensate the sensor latencies even if they cannot be observed directly.

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.