Automatic synchronization of speech transcript and slides in presentation

An increasing number of university lectures and a vast majority of company presentations are being digitally archived for redistribution. Most of these presentations take the form of a speaker lecturing while guided by the accompanying display of pre-composed presentation slides such as Microsoft PowerPoint. As these presentations are digitized, the time-consuming task of creating a unified archive through the merging of video and slide streams represents a hurdle to the automation of this process. This paper presents a system addressing the task of automatically synchronizing presentation slides with the speaker video, through a global adaptive curve fitting algorithm. We tested the algorithm with the lecture media obtained from the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA) distance education courses, and show that automatic synchronization achieved an acceptable result.