A portable solution for automatic lecture room camera management

Rapid advances in technology and decreasing costs have made it possible to attach high resolution video cameras to just about any computer and record the interactions in a lecture room. Additionally, lecture rooms may be outfitted with several cameras for this purpose. However, recording the interactions alone does not create effective video. We present a method for not only recording, but also editing in real-time, lectures. Unlike previous work, the system is highly portable, allowing quick set-up in various types of lecture rooms. This portability is achieved by using the abstraction of virtual cameramen and physical cameras, and a scriptable interface to the editing rules.