Whiteboard

Established: August 6, 2002

Digital Technology for Effective Whiteboard Use

Introduction

Whiteboard is ubiquitous and will exist for foreseeable future, but its content is hard to archive and share. While digital cameras can be used to capture whiteboard content, the image is usually taken from an angle, contains irrelevant information, and has shadows.

We have developed an intelligent and automatic technique to reproduce the whiteboard content as a crisp and faithful image which can be archived or shared with others. Furthermore, we cover other scenarios such as scanning the whiteboard with a low-resolution PC camera and, by adding a microphone, streaming the meeting to remote participants and archiving it for ulterior efficient browsing.

The technologies we have been developing allow information workers to use whiteboard in a more effective way, yet without increasing their burden of adapting their behavior to new technologies as other commercial systems do.

Systems

Depending on different scenarios, we provide four systems:

  1. Whiteboard It!: Use a digital camera as a great tool for note taking.
  2. Whiteboard Scanning: Scan the whiteboard by stitching multiple images together.
  3. Whiteboard Archiving: Record both whiteboard activities and audio meeting, and provide efficient meeting browsing interface.
  4. Whiteboard Streaming (Live Whiteboard): Stream whiteboard contents to remote party for annotation and real-time feedback. The whiteboard contents captured by a video camera have been processed in real time to remove foreground moving objects and to enhance image quality.

 

Distributed Meetings and RoundTable

Introduction

The Distributed Meeting project started in 2000, which was initially for meeting recording. It later evolved into an incubation, and finally shipped as a product called Microsoft RoundTable. Many people within Microsoft have contributed to this project.

Technologies