Boosting-Based Multimodal Speaker Detection for Distributed Meetings

Speaker detection is a very important task in distributed meeting applications. This paper discusses a number of challenges we met while designing a speaker detector for the Microsoft RoundTable distributed meeting device, and proposes a boosting-based multimodal speaker detection (BMSD) algorithm. Instead of performing sound source localization (SSL) and multi-person detection (MPD) separately and subsequently fusing their individual results, the proposed algorithm uses boosting to select features from a combined pool of both audio and visual features simultaneously. The result is a very accurate speaker detector with extremely high efficiency. The algorithm reduces the error rate of SSL-only approach by 47%, and the SSL and MPD fusion approach by 27%.