Patent ID: 8380039

Claim:
A method for aligning two individual collections of images or videos captured for the same event by two different cameras to produce a master stream, comprising: (a) accessing the two individual collections of images or videos captured for the same event by two different cameras, wherein each individual collection is separate and forms a media stream in chronological order; (b) extracting image features for each image or video of the media stream of each collection; (c) constructing a sparse bipartite graph having weighted directed edge information based on the extracted features to link the images or videos from the two media streams; (d) finding on the graph at least a pair of images or videos, each from one of the two media streams, that corresponds to correlated captured content by selecting pairs of images or videos that have significantly non-zero edge weights with respect to the other of the pair; (e) aligning the remaining images or videos in response to the aligned pair so that the all images or videos from the two media streams are aligned over a common timeline by using max linkage selection to prune edges on the graph if a node has multiple edges linked to other nodes; and (f) producing a master stream in chronological order of the event over a common timeline by merging the aligned individual streams; and (g) storing, displaying or transmitting the master stream.