An automated end-to-end lecture capture and broadcasting system

Remote viewing of lectures presented to a live audience is becoming increasingly popular. At the same time, the lectures can be recorded for subsequent on-demand viewing over the Internet. Providing such services, however, is often prohibitive due to the labor-intensive cost of capturing and pre/post-processing. This article presents a complete automated end-to-end system that supports capturing, broadcasting, viewing, archiving and searching of presentations. Specifically, we describe a system architecture that minimizes the pre- and post-production time, and a fully automated lecture capture system called iCam2 that synchronously captures all contents of the lecture, including audio, video, and presentation material. No staff is needed during lecture capture and broadcasting, so the operational cost of the system is negligible. The system has been used on a daily basis for more than 4 years, during which 522 lectures have been captured. These lectures have been viewed over 20,000 times.