Omnidirectional Video Capturing, Multiple People Tracking and Identification for Meeting Monitoring

Meetings are a very important part of every days life for professionals working in universities, companies or governmental institutions. In fact, it is estimated that a midlevel manager or professional spends around 35% of his/her time in meetings. We have designed a physical awareness system called CAMEO (Camera Assisted Meeting Event Observer), a hardware/software component to record and monitor people’s activities in meetings. CAMEO captures the audio and a high resolution omnidirectional view of the meeting by stitching images coming from almost concentric cameras. Besides recording capabilities, CAMEO automatically detects people and automatically learns a personspecific facial appearance model (PSFAM) for each of the participants. The PSFAMs allow more robust, reliable and faster tracking and identification. Several novelties in the video capturing device, multiple person identification and tracking are proposed. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed system is demonstrated over several real time experiments and a large data set of videos.