Starting May 31st, 2023, a pilot with an auto-tracking camera will take place in CEG-hall B.
A tracking pilot is already ongoing in CEG-E, with a double camera unit for overview and tracking shot. In CEG-B, a computer will be analyzing the camera feed from the already present camera and track according to certain rules. The aim is to frame the lecturer and make his/her analogue writing visible to the viewer. The results of this pilot will be held against recordings which are currently made with help of student operators, who control the camera manually. This pilot is run together with the AV-ICT department of the TU Delft.
What is expected of me?
For the pilot in CEG-B, we will make test recordings of lectures which are not meant to be published. The recordings will only be used by the Collegerama team to make a good comparison between the two tracking solutions. Currently, Collegerama works with a group of TU students to make manually controlled recordings. This way of working costs time and money; an efficient tracking solution could work autonomously.
The lecturer doesn’t have to do anything other than give his/her lecture as normal. The person who stands/walks in the front of the hall during, will be seen as the one who needs to be tracked. A certain area will be assigned, within which the tracking camera needs to find and follow the lecturer. If the tracking camera is ‘lost’, it will resort to a default preset and try to recover tracking from there on. We will try to make sure only the lecturer is framed during a recording. However, if students come near the lecturer, they will also be captured in the recording. This also happens in our current recordings.
What will a recording look like?
These recordings will not be published (for students) on Collegerama; they are made to examine the results of the tracking solution.
On the touch panel, located at the lectern, a notice will appear once a Collegerama recording has started. The tracking camera will also be active when Collegerama is not recording.
