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Tracking the activity of participants in a meeting

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Abstract

A vision system suitable for a smart meeting room able to analyse the activities of its occupants is described. Multiple people were tracked using a particle filter in which samples were iteratively re-weighted using an approximate likelihood in each frame. Trackers were automatically initialised and constrained using simple contextual knowledge of the room layout. Person–person occlusion was handled using multiple cameras. The method was evaluated on video sequences of a six person meeting. The tracker was demonstrated to outperform standard sampling importance re-sampling. All meeting participants were successfully tracked and their actions were recognised throughout the meeting scenarios tested.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Applied Computing, University of Dundee, Dundee, DD1 4HN, Scotland

    Hammadi Nait Charif & Stephen J. McKenna

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  1. Hammadi Nait Charif
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  2. Stephen J. McKenna
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Correspondence to Stephen J. McKenna.

Additional information

H. Nait Charif was funded by UK EPSRC Grant GR/R27419/01.

Hammadi Nait Charif was born in Tinghir, Ouarzazat, Morocco on 25 December 1965. He received his Master of Engineering (Ingenieur d'Etat Diploma) in electrical engineering in 1990 and after a short-term job with the Ministry of Telecommunication, was appointed lecturer at Mohamed I University in 1991. He was a Monbusho visiting research fellow at Chiba University, Japan (1994–1995) where he received his PhD in 1998. He was an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor in electrical engineering at Mohamed I University (1998–2001). In 1999, he was a Fulbright Visiting Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. At the University of Dundee he has worked on the EPSRC project “Advanced Sensors for Supportive Environments for Elderly”. His research interests include image processing, computer vision and neural networks.

Stephen McKenna is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee. He graduated BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh and PhD from the University of Dundee (1994). He has held post-doctoral research positions at Queen Mary, University of London and Tecnopolis Csata, Italy and has been a visiting researcher at BT Labs and George Mason University. Funders of his research include EPSRC, BBSRC and MRC. He has served on international program committees and is an Associate Editor of the journal Machine Vision and Applications. He co-authored the book “Dynamic Vision” and has published 75 articles on computer vision and pattern recognition. His research interests include the application of computer vision, imaging and machine learning to intelligent human–computer interaction, monitoring, surveillance, medicine and biology.

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Charif, H.N., McKenna, S.J. Tracking the activity of participants in a meeting. Machine Vision and Applications 17, 83–93 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-006-0015-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-006-0015-5

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