Patent ID: 7099894

Claim:
A multimedia information collection control apparatus, comprising: a multimedia information collection unit configured to collect multimedia information from a plurality of kinds of input devices, including a camera and a microphone; a multimedia correspondence memory configured to correspondingly store the multimedia information including an image and a speech; a display configured to output the image and an attribute selection window including a plurality of attribute items of characters; an indicator configured to artificially specify a recognition area of the image on said display by using a mark, a shape of the mark corresponding to a kind of a recognition object: an information recognition unit having a plurality of knowledge dictionaries each corresponding to each of the plurality of attribute items, configured to select one attribute item from the plurality of attribute items in response to a user's indication, to recognize characters in the recognition area by using one of the plurality of knowledge dictionaries corresponding to the one attribute item and the kind of the recognition object, to extract personal data from the recognition result of the characters, and to identify a speaker from the speech; and a multimedia database configured to relationally store the multimedia information in correspondence with the identified speaker by using the personal data.