Tracking Virtual Meetings in the Wild: Re-identification in Multi-Participant Virtual Meetings

In recent years, workplaces and educational institutes have widely adopted virtual meeting platforms. This has led to a growing interest in analyzing and extracting insights from these meetings, which requires effective detection and tracking of unique individuals. In practice, there is no standardization in video meetings recording layout, and how they are captured across the different platforms and services. This, in turn, creates a challenge in acquiring this data stream and analyzing it in a uniform fashion. Our approach provides a solution to the most general form of video recording, usually consisting of a grid of participants (\cref{fig:videomeeting}) from a single video source with no metadata on participant locations, while using the least amount of constraints and assumptions as to how the data was acquired. Conventional approaches often use YOLO models coupled with tracking algorithms, assuming linear motion trajectories akin to that observed in CCTV footage. However, such assumptions fall short in virtual meetings, where participant video feed window can abruptly change location across the grid. In an organic video meeting setting, participants frequently join and leave, leading to sudden, non-linear movements on the video grid. This disrupts optical flow-based tracking methods that depend on linear motion. Consequently, standard object detection and tracking methods might mistakenly assign multiple participants to the same tracker. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to track and re-identify participants in remote video meetings, by utilizing the spatio-temporal priors arising from the data in our domain. This, in turn, increases tracking capabilities compared to the use of general object tracking. Our approach reduces the error rate by 95% on average compared to YOLO-based tracking methods as a baseline.

Minimizing Embedding Distortion for Robust Out-of-Distribution Performance

Foundational models, trained on vast and diverse datasets, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generalizing across different domains and distributions for various zero-shot tasks. Our work addresses the challenge of retaining these powerful generalization capabilities when adapting foundational models to specific downstream tasks through fine-tuning. To this end, we introduce a novel approach we call "similarity loss", which can be incorporated into the fine-tuning process of any task. By minimizing the distortion of fine-tuned embeddings from the pre-trained embeddings, our method strikes a balance between task-specific adaptation and preserving broad generalization abilities. We evaluate our approach on two diverse tasks: image classification on satellite imagery and face recognition, focusing on open-class and domain shift scenarios to assess out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves OOD performance while maintaining strong in-distribution (ID) performance.