eMeeting: a multimedia application for interactive meeting and seminar

We present a client/server-based un-intrusive collaborative multimedia application - called eMeeting - that extracts and archives salient visual information from seminars, while allowing interaction among presenters and the audience in real time. The application uses APIs of the Lotus Sametime/spl reg/ system such as secure login, directory, meeting and multimedia services, to which we have added our own extensions. These extensions use the binary messaging channel of Sametime and allow us to add stroke-based chat as well as stroke-based annotations of slides. This permits communication among all clients. In parallel with the services just mentioned and in the same Java application, users of eMeeting are presented with slides that the system extracts from the presenter's visual material using an automatic recognition algorithm that classifies video frames as slides. At this time we assume that the system may or may not have access to the visual content in electronic form. Users can follow the seminar in the form of presenter's video, and as a series of extracted images. The server transmits the slides cyclically to each user using IP multicast giving each client the opportunity to select any previous slide. Thus, late joiners can browse slides that have been accumulated by the system.