Building an intelligent camera management system

Given rapid improvements in storage devices, network infrastructure and streaming-media technologies, a large number of corporations and universities are recording lectures and making them available online for anytime, anywhere access. However, producing high-quality lecture videos is still labor intensive and expensive. Fortunately, recent technology advances are making it feasible to build automated camera management systems to capture lectures. In this paper we report our design of such a system, including system configuration, audio-visual tracking techniques, software architecture, and user study. Motivated by different roles in a professional video production team, we have developed a multi-cinematographer single-director camera management system. The system performs lecturer tracking, audience tracking, and video editing all fully automatically, and offers quality close to that of human-operated systems