Reasoning for video-mediated group communication

In this paper we present an approach to the reasoning required to support multi-location, multi-camera group-to-group video communication, which we call orchestration. Orchestration is akin to virtual directing: it has to ensure that each location displays the most adequate shots from all the other available sources. Its input is low-level cues extracted automatically from the AV streams. They are processed to detect higher-level events that determine the state of the communication. Directorial decisions are then inferred, reflecting social communication as well as stylistic criteria. Finally, they are transformed into camera and editing commands, directly executable by the AV infrastructure. Here, we present the architecture of the Orchestrator and sketch our rule-based approach to reasoning.