CamaLeon
Laurent Denoue, Scott L. Carter, Chelhwon Kim · 2019
Despite work on smart spaces, nowadays a lot of knowledge work happens in the wild: at home, in coffee places, trains, buses, planes, and of course in crowded open office cubicles. Conducting web conferences in these settings creates privacy issues, and can also distract participants, leading to a perceived lack of professionalism from the remote peer(s). To solve this common problem, we implemented CamaLeon, a browser-based tool that uses real-time machine vision powered by deep learning to change the webcam stream sent by the remote peer. Specifically, CamaLeon dynamically changes the "wild" background into one that resembles that of the office workers. In order to detect the background in disparate settings, we designed and trained a fast UNet model on head and shoulder images. CamaLeon also uses a face detector to determine whether it should stream the person's face, depending on its location (or lack of presence). It uses face recognition to make sure it streams only a face that belongs to the user who connected to the meeting. We tested the system during a few real video conferencing calls at our company in which two workers are remote. Both parties felt a sense of enhanced co-presence, and the remote participants felt more professional with their background replaced.