Smart room: participant and speaker localization and identification

Our long-term objective is to create smart room technologies that are aware of the users presence and their behavior and can become an active, but not an intrusive, part of the interaction. In this work, we present a multimodal approach for estimating and tracking the location and identity of the participants including the active speaker. Our smart room design contains three user-monitoring systems: four CCD cameras, an omnidirectional camera and a 16 channel microphone array. The various sensory modalities are processed both individually and jointly and it is shown that the multimodal approach results in significantly improved performance in spatial localization, identification and speech activity detection of the participants.