A Rule-Based Virtual Director Enhancing Group Communication

Audiovisual group communication systems deal with a large number of video streams, and, unlike less advanced videoconferencing systems, require intelligence for selecting adequate views for each of the connected rooms, in order to convey best what is happening in the other locations. Such a decision making component, in our implementation called Orchestration Engine (OE), acts as a Virtual Director. It processes low level events, emitted by content analysis sensors, into editing commands. The OE has two main components: one that semantically lifts low-level events into communication events and one that associates editing decisions to communication contexts. The former has to deal with uncertain and delayed information. The latter subsumes knowledge that reflects both conversation and narrative principles. Both components include contradicting bodies of knowledge. We investigate a rule-based event processing approach and reflect the scalability of our solution regarding competing and contradicting rules.