Robust Automatic Video-Conferencing with Multiple Cameras and Microphones

An automatic video-conferencing system is proposed which employs acoustic source localization, video face tracking and pose estimation, and multi-channel speech enhancement. The video portion of the system tracks talkers by utilizing source motion, contour geometry, color data, and simple facial features. Decisions involving which camera to use are based on an estimate of the head’s gazing angle. This head pose estimation is achieved using a very general head model which employs hairline features and a learned network classification procedure. Finally, a wavelet microphone array technique is used to create an enhanced speech waveform to accompany the recorded video signal. The system presented in this paper is robust to both visual clutter (e.g. ovals in the scene of interest which are not faces) and audible noise (e.g. reverberations and background noise).