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One cause of anxiety for people participating in videoconferences is their inability to move in the room where they are. In a traditional conference, one can move very easily, and may need to stand up to write something on a board, or pace back and forth in the case of a lecture for example. In that case, any system would need a person to move the camera so that it is always focused on the speaker ; for a video conference, as soon as the speaker stands up, he or she leaves the field of the camera, and everyone involved in the conference now sees a nice image of the speaker’s stomach.
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All those problems can be avoided by creating a tracking camera. For our purpose, we need to track any particular person that can be recognized by the camera in advance, i.e. the camera has to track the particular person we want it to track. We chose to track the person who is wearing a special badge that we designed, which is emitting infrared light.
Our Setup consists of 2 Servo Motors connected to a Phidget Interface Kit via a PhidgetServo. The Web Camera is mounted on the Motors which in turn are mounted on the e-box.
The IR Receivers are mounted on a cardboard through which the Web Camera is inserted and are connected to the Phidget Interface Kit. Details of the setup are described in the sections on Mechanical System and IR System.
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Applications
Such a Tracking Camera is useful during Video Conferencing. The speaker generally has a tendency to pace to and fro so a tracking camera is handy to keep the camera focussed on him/her
so that he/she is visible at all times to remote site viewers.
Rather than having a person manually adjusting the camera each time the speaker moves, we propose an IR solution.
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Team Members
Alexandre Lenoble
Chloe Milion
Nagesh B L
Sushma Rao
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