EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 195743, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/195743
Research Article
Anthropocentric Video Segmentation for Lecture Webcasts
1International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center Street, Suite 600 Berkeley, CA 94704-1198, USA
2Institut für Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin, Takustrasse 9, Berlin 14195, Germany
Received 31 January 2007; Revised 16 July 2007; Accepted 12 December 2007
Academic Editor: Ioannis Pitas
Copyright © 2008 Gerald Friedland and Raul Rojas. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Many lecture recording and presentation systems
transmit slides or chalkboard content along with
a small video of the instructor. As a result, two
areas of the screen are competing for the viewer's
attention, causing the widely known split-attention
effect. Face and body gestures, such as pointing,
do not appear in the context of the slides or the
board. To eliminate this problem, this article proposes
to extract the lecturer from the video stream
and paste his or her image onto the board or slide
image. As a result, the lecturer acting in front of
the board or slides becomes the center of attention.
The entire lecture presentation becomes
more human-centered. This article presents both
an analysis of the underlying psychological problems
and an explanation of signal processing techniques
that are applied in a concrete system. The
presented algorithm is able to extract and overlay
the lecturer online and in real time at full video resolution.