Development of vision based meeting support system for hearing impaired

This paper describes a new meeting support system that helps the hearing impaired to understand the contents of the meeting. The proposed system distinguishes the mainstream of the discussion from other chattering based on the utterances. The situation of the meeting is acquired as a picture using an omni-directional vision sensor, and the system analyzes speaker’s relations from the captured image by using face directions for the participants. The system shows the mainstream and the chattering of a meeting by using the analyzed result and speech-recognition.