Why Take Notes? Use the Whiteboard Capture System

This paper describes our recently developed system which captures both whiteboard content and audio signals of a meeting using a digital still camera and a microphone. Our system can be retrofit to any existing whiteboard. It computes the time stamps of pen strokes on the whiteboard by analyzing the sequence of captured snapshots. It also automatically produces a set of key frames representing all the written content on the whiteboard before each erasure. Therefore the whiteboard content serves as a visual index to efficiently browse the audio meeting. It is a complete system which not only captures the whiteboard content, but also helps the users to view and manage the captured meeting content efficiently and securely.