Automatic Camera Control Using Unobtrusive Vision and Audio Tracking

Researchers: Abhishek Ranjan, Jeremy Birnholtz, Rorik Henrikson, Ravin Balakrishnan, Dana Lee

http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~aranjan/

While video can be useful for remotely attending and archiving
meetings, the video itself is often dull and difficult to watch. One
key reason for this is that, except in very high-end systems, little
attention has been paid to the production quality of the video
being captured. The video stream from a meeting often lacks
detail and camera shots rarely change unless a person is tasked
with operating the camera. This stands in stark contrast to live
television, where a professional director creates engaging video
by juggling multiple cameras to provide a variety of interesting
views. In this paper, we applied lessons from television
production to the problem of using automated camera control and
selection to improve the production quality of meeting video. In
an extensible and robust approach, our system uses off-the-shelf
cameras and microphones to unobtrusively track the location and
activity of meeting participants, control three cameras, and cut
between these to create video with a variety of shots and views, in
real-time. Evaluation by users and independent coders suggests
promising initial results and directions for future work.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• automatic
• camera
• control
• computer
• vision
• tracking
• video
• conferencing