Autonomous multi-angle capture
Can a delay prior taken from a camera's own earlier windows give the oracle-prior gain in GCC audio sync?
research/capture-trackprior
Can a delay prior from a camera's own earlier windows replace the oracle? Not yet: 22.5% to 37% wrong on the failing clips against 0% for the oracle, and an early alias becomes an hour-long lock-in.
6 tests
What it found
Follow-up to capture-aliaswin, whose ±10 ms prior was centred on the true delay and gave 0% wrong windows. Here the prior is a Theil-Sen line through the camera's own earlier estimates (ten real LibreOffice clips, 2 s windows, 0 dB white noise, 0.8 s offset, ±40 ppm drift, 252 scored windows per clip). It does not reproduce the oracle: with one prior-free bootstrap window it is as bad as no prior on the four failing clips (37.4% vs 37.5% wrong) and 37% of those cameras are wrong in every scored window of the hour, because an early alias is tracked rather than corrected; five bootstrap windows reach 22.5% wrong (14% of cameras lost). Capping the half-width under the clip's period breaks clips that worked when the line has no slope yet (33.8% wrong on six clips that had 0%). Limits: constant simulated drift, one SNR, an untuned fit and half-width rule, ten clips. Added 2026-10-29: gating (re-acquire when the unrestricted GCC peak is 1.5× the in-prior peak) cuts the fraction of lost cameras on the failing clips from 36.8% to 7.6–9.7% and the wrong share to 22.1% with one bootstrap window, leaving the six good clips at 0%; the tone clip space2 is not fixed (60–81% wrong) because its aliases have equal peak heights.
Research log
Ongoing: each run adds a batch and an entry, newest first. Source: LOG.md.
2026-10-29 · Gated tracking with re-acquisition (planned, then results below)
- Hypothesis. Re-acquiring when the unrestricted GCC peak is
ratio times higher than the best peak inside the tracked prior cuts lock-loss (cameras with every scored window wrong) on the four failing clips from 0.368 (1 bootstrap window, no gate) to under 0.15, without breaking the six clips at 0.000 wrong. Refuted if lock-loss stays above 0.25 at every ratio in 1.2..3, or if the six good clips exceed 0.02 wrong. - Analysis.
experiments/gated.py: same windows as run.py, boot in (1, 3), ratio in (1.2, 1.5, 2, 3), reported with the ungated track and no-prior cells; wrong share, lost-lock share, share of windows re-acquired. - Outcome (
experiments/gated.txt, 12 seeds x 3 cameras x 7 scored windows per clip and cell). Supported on lock-loss, not on the wrong-window share. On the four failing clips, lock-loss falls from 0.368 (ungated, 1 bootstrap) to 0.076 at ratio 1.2, 0.097 at 1.5, 0.139 at 2 and 0.271 at 3; the six good clips stay at 0.000 wrong at every ratio. The wrong share is lowest at ratio 1.5 (0.221 on the four, against 0.375 with no prior and 0.225 for the 5-bootstrap ungated track). space2 is not fixed (0.60 to 0.81 wrong against 0.659 with no prior): a gate that trusts the peak height cannot pick between a tone's aliases, which have equal heights. Ratio 1.2 re-acquires in 15% of windows on the failing clips.
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.