The NIST Smart Space Project
Pervasive devices, sensors, and networks, provide infrastructure for
context-aware smart meeting rooms that sense ongoing human activities
and respond to them. These technologies require advances in areas
including networking, distributed computing, sensor data acquisition,
signal processing, speech recognition, human identification, and
natural language processing. Open interoperability and metrology
standards for the sensor and recognition technologies can aid research
and development programs in making these advances. To address this
need the NIST Smart Space and Meeting Recognition projects are
developing tools for data formats, transport, distributed processing,
and metadata. We are using them to create annotated multimodal
research corpora and measurement algorithms for smart meeting rooms,
which we are making available to interested members of the research
and development community.
The NIST mission is to address measurement, standards and
interoperability challenges that must be met as tools for industrial
Research and Development laboratories worldwide.
The Meeting Room Recognition Project application
Smart
Spaces require large amounts of sensor data to be transported to
networked processing resources. We have defined an abstract data
transport mechanism and a reference implementation for the Linux
Operating System to support research in the area. We hope you will
join us, and our several existing contributors in further developing
this system. It is fully in the public domain. Our primary internal
application of this system is in the NIST Meeting Recognition project.
The figures below show the meeting room in operation on its review
station, and the NIST Smart Data Flow map that performs the streaming
media transfer and distributed processing necessary for the data
collection. We handle data streams from two hundred eighty
microphones and seven HD video cameras, and produce data files that
can be retrieved by time stamp. This data is used to support
recognition processing research communities working in audio, video,
and sensor fusions. These generate two-hundred gigabytes per hour of
data on many nodes on a gigabit network. This technology will be
important in the office of the future, and in command and situation
management centers.
Figure 1. The NIST Meeting Room Data Collection Laboratory in
operation. The review station shows seven views; six in thumb-nail,
and one at center. Level meters for the twenty-four random placement
microphones and four microphone arrays are at bottom.
Figure 2. The NIST Smart Data Flow System data flow map for the
meeting room at the Smart Flow Control Center showing the twenty-seven
data flow nodes, and the flow connections that represent the data
transport.
Figure 3. The NIST Mark-III Micrphone Array was created to enable our
research partners in developing techniques for speech recognition,
speaker identification, source localization, and source separation in
meetings.
Summary
The Smart Space Project works in the areas of:
- High data rate sensor data trasport and processing
- Unique sensor technology needed for Smart Spaces
- Signal quality measurements for speech
The infrastructure and measurement tools that we make available to the
research and development community are having positive impacts on
efforts to develop next generation of multimodal computer interfaces.
Please follow the link to:
Software and Hardware Tools
to see our open reference implementations of sensor data flow,
microphone array, and new speech SNR metric, and the link to
Some Partners and Users
to see some of our partnerships. If you are interested in the
project, please contact us to discuss collaborative research and
development.
NIST is an agency of the US Department of Commerce's Technology Administration
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