Tracking the activity of participants in a meeting

A vision system suitable for a smart meeting room able to analyse the activities of its occupants is described. Multiple people were tracked using a particle filter in which samples were iteratively re-weighted using an approximate likelihood in each frame. Trackers were automatically initialised and constrained using simple contextual knowledge of the room layout. Person-person occlusion was handled using multiple cameras. The method was evaluated on video sequences of a six person meeting. The tracker was demonstrated to outperform standard sampling importance re-sampling. All meeting participants were successfully tracked and their actions were recognised throughout the meeting scenarios tested.