A Mixed-State I-Particle Filter for Multi-Camera Speaker Tracking

Tracking speakers in multi-party conversations represents an important step towards automatic analysis of meetings. In this paper, we present a probabilistic method for audio-visual (AV) speaker tracking in a multi-sensor meeting room. The algorithm fuses information coming from three uncalibrated cameras and a microphone array via a mixed-state importance particle filter, allowing for the integration of AV streams to exploit the complementary features of each modality. Our method relies on several principles. First, a mixed state space formulation is used to define a generative model for camera switching. Second, AV localization information is used to define an importance sampling function, which guides the search process of a particle filter towards regions of the configuration space likely to contain the true configuration (a speaker). Finally, the measurement process integrates shape, color, and audio observations. We show that the principled combination of imperfect modalities results in an algorithm that automatically initializes and tracks speakers engaged in real conversations, reliably switching across cameras and between participants.