Yeah. It isn’t about cheating, fairness, who got in a lane first. Isn’t territory to defend. We don’t have to enforce rules on each other. The traffic planners and road crews went through a bit of effort with like signs and cones and shit to tell us where they want us to merge. Zippering helps everyone go faster. Kinda why the planners want us to do it.
Why think of it as a compression problem? Isn’t the spy device already getting compressed video form some source? That makes it a filtering problem. You would set it to grab and ship key frames (or equivalent term) if you wanted a human to be able to see the intel. But for content matching, maybe count some interval of key frames and then grab the smallest difference frame between the next two key frames. Gives a nice, premade small data chunk. A few of those in sequence starts looking like a hash function (on a dark foggy night).
Would want some way to sync up the frames that the spy device grabs and the ones grabbed when building the db to match against. Maybe resetting the key frame interval counter when some set of simple frames come through would be enough. Like anything with a uniform color across the whole image or something similar.
Just spitballing here. I like your impulse to math this.