WACE 2005 – The Automated Lecture Capturing and Broadcasting System in MSR’s 1159

You may already know that lectures given in 113/1159 are being recorded by an automated lecture capturing system on a daily basis. When there is a lecture in progress, you always have the option to go to http://resnet and watch the lecture live online. Or, you may watch it afterwards by visiting the same site, and have the freedom to pause/fast forward/fast backward, etc. The system has been used on a daily basis for more than 4 years, during which 522 lectures were captured with 20,000+ online viewers.
In this talk, I will show you how we make such a fully automated system. I will first give an overview on the system architecture, which minimizes the pre- and post-production time, and supports capturing, broadcasting, viewing, archiving and search. Then I will focus on our second generation automated lecture capturing system called iCam2, developed in the past 2 years. ICam2 can synchronously capture all the contents of the lecture, including audio, video and visual aids. Improvement over the previous iCam system include much better portability, hybrid speaker tracking, enhanced audio quality, scripting language for virtual director configuration, etc.