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Automatic Camera Control for Capturing Collaborative Meetings

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.
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.
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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/17821
Date25 September 2009
CreatorsRanjan, Abhishek
ContributorsBalakrishnan, Ravin
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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