Patent ID: 7292543

Claim:
A multiple 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 state machine 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 a indicator of the classification of each of said signals; feature extractors connected to said state machine for receiving said indicator and to said local participant signals for measuring and extracting at least one feature of each of said local participant signals classified as voice; a local speaker tracker connected to said feature extractors for selecting a number of said local participant signals for tracking based upon said extracted features; a first multiplexer connected to said speaker tracker, said local participant signals and said system communication bus, for passing said selected local participant signals and said extracted features to said system communication bus and for blocking the remaining local participant signals from said system communication bus; a demultiplexer connected to said system communication bus for receiving selected and passed participant signals from other remote nodes connected to said system bus and for receiving said extracted features of each of said selected and passed signals from said other remote conferencing nodes; a multi-core speaker tracker connected to said demultiplexer and to said local speaker tracker for comparing said extracted features of each of said significant signals of said local participant input signals and said remote participant input signals and providing a control signal to said first multiplexer to control the transmission of local significant signals to said system bus based upon said comparison; and a second multiplexer connected to said multi-core speaker tracker and to said first multiplexer to provide selected signals of said local and remote participants to said local participants.