Automatic camera control for capturing collaborative meetings.

摘要

The growing size of organizations is making it increasingly expensive to attend meetings and difficult to retain what happened in those meetings. Meeting video capture systems exist to support video conferencing for remote participation or archiving for later review, but they have been regarded ineffective. The reason is twofold. Firstly, the conventional way of capturing video using a single static camera fails to capture focus and context. Secondly, a single static view is often monotonous, making the video onerous to review. To address these issues, often human camera operators are employed to capture effective videos with changing views, but this approach is expensive.;The result of the evaluation of the automatic camera control system indicated its significant benefits over conventional static camera view. By applying television production principles various issues related to shot stability and screen motion were resolved. The performance of the automatic camera control based on television production principles also approached the performance of trained human camera crew. To further reduce the cost of the automation, we also explored the application of computer vision and audio tracking.;Results of our explorations provide empirical evidence in support of the utility of camera control encouraging future research in this area. Successful application of television production principles to automatically control cameras suggest various ways to handle issues involved in the automation process.;In this thesis, we argue that camera views can be changed automatically to produce meeting videos effectively and inexpensively. We automate the camera view control by automatically determining the visual focus of attention as a function of time and moving the camera to capture it. In order to determine visual focus of attention for different meetings, we conducted experiments and interviewed television production professionals who capture meeting videos. Furthermore, television production principles were used to appropriately frame shots and switch between shots.