Production of video images by computer controlled cameras and its application to TV conference system

TV conference systems have been widely used recently. A participant of each site proceeds with a TV conference using video image on a screen and voice of a partner site. In this case, a fixed video camera shoots a scene of a site in general. The video image taken by a fixed camera, however, is lacking in changes. Also the fixed camera does not take shots efficiency that the participants of a partner site pay attention. As one of the candidates to avoid these defects, there is a method that the computer-controlled cameras shoots the scene. In this paper we propose an algorithm of shooting the best shot by computer-controlled cameras. The shooting algorithm is mainly decided by estimating an area of the image with high degree of attention, which is given by not only visual information but also auditory information. By using an experimental system, we confirm the effectiveness of our approach by examining a questionnaire from the participants of TV conferences.