The AMI Consortium creates their highest quality recordings in specially instrumented meeting rooms that provide many different signals for the same underlying events: close-talking and far-field audios, individual and room-view videos, plus the output of the data projector, electronic whiteboard, and individual digital pens.

The meetings were actually recorded in three different rooms with different acoustic properties and layouts in order to give us some variation, but the rooms are broadly similar. Audio capture is highly redundant, with wireless omni-directional lapel and headset condensor microphones to capture individual speakers as well as two circular eight-microphone arrays for far-field capture. Video capture is via six cameras, four showing individual views and two showing room views that differ depending on which of the three room being used. Except for the digital pen output, all signals are synchronized using global timestamping.

As our basic research progresses, we are also making recordings using lower quality signal capture, with equipment that we can set up in any meeting room.