Audio-Visual Processing in Meetings: Seven Questions and Some AMI Answers

The project Augmented Multi-party Interaction (AMI) is concerned with the development of meeting browsers and remote meet- ing assistants for instrumented meeting rooms - and the required com- ponent technologies R&D themes: group dynamics, audio, visual, and multimodal processing, content abstraction, and human-computer inter- action. The audio-visual processing workpackage within AMI addresses the automatic recognition from audio, video, and combined audio-video streams, that have been recorded during meetings. In this article we describe the progress that has been made in the first two years of the project. We show how the large problem of audio-visual processing in meetings can be split into seven questions, like "Who is acting during the meeting?". We then show which algorithms and methods have been developed and evaluated for the automatic answering of these questions.