Extraction of students' events for a distant lecture using a computer room

Distance Education Course (DEC) has been becoming more and more popular in many universities with the fast development of the Internet technology. The communication between the teacher and the students in DEC environment is, however, a more difficult problem than that of conventional courses. This paper proposes a real-time detecting method of students’ attitude to enhance the communications between the teacher and the students who take part in the lecture in a computer room. This method detects the events on the student’s personal computer (PC), and detects the existence of the student in front of PC and the direction of the student’s face by the image processing. The teacher can judge whether each student takes part in the lecture positively. Finally, our experimental results have illustrated the feasibility of this method.