Patent ID: 7145884

Claim:
A single core speaker tracking system in a distributed conferencing system, comprising: a system communication bus; a plurality of nodes connected to said system communication bus, each of said plurality of nodes comprising a processor that comprises: a state machine module for receiving a signal from each of a plurality of local participants connected to said node for classification of said signals as voice or noise and for producing an indicator of the classification of each of said signals; a voice activity detection module, operatively connected to the state machine module and local communication channels of each node, for classifying voice signals in the signal from each of the plurality of local participants; a feature extraction module, operatively connected to said state machine and the voice detection module, for receiving said indicator and for measuring and extracting at least one feature of a signal feature of a power level, a short-term energy, a long-term energy, and a zero crossing level from each of said local participant signals classified as voice by the voice activity detection module; a speaker tracking module, operatively connected to said feature extraction module, for selecting a number of said local participant signals for transmission to the system communication bus and for selecting a number of local participant signals for muting based upon said extracted signal features; and a multiplexer, operatively connected to said speaker tracking module and said system communication bus, for passing said local participant signals selected by the speaking tracking module for transmission to said system communication bus and for blocking the remaining local participant signals selected for muting from said system communication bus.