Real-Time Speaker Identification and Participant Tracking in The Access Grid

The Access Grid is a group-to-group videoconferencing technology deployed at over 150 locations worldwide. We believe that there is a need for the Access Grid and other real-time collaboration technologies to provide a richness of interaction that goes beyond just audio, video and simple data sharing. This paper starts by describing in general terms possible extensions to real-time collaboration technology for achieving this and then describes two specific enhancements in the context of the Access Grid, namely speaker identification and participant tracking for the automatic generation of dynamically updated attendance lists. These extensions replace vital perceptual cues lost when videoconferencing, and also have a number of other important benefits, particularly for archiving. We make a case for why these improvements are required in an Access Grid environment and describe current and planned implementation work on a prototype system.