Television conference system including many television monitors and method for controlling the same

A system for providing television conferencing from a transmit side to a receive side, the transmit side including a plurality of associated microphone-TV camera pairs, the microphones being for producing speaker-voice signals and the TV cameras being for producing speaker-moving picture signals, the receive side including a loudspeaker for broadcasting a selected one of the speaker-voice signals and a plurality of TV monitors for respectively displaying selected ones of either the speaker-moving picture signals or a still frame of such signals, each of the TV cameras and the TV monitors having a respective ID, the transmit and receive sides being interconnected by a transmission link, the system further comprising:

• selection means for both predetermining according to ID a respective TV monitor for displaying a speaker-moving picture signal and a TV camera whose speaker-moving picture signal is to be transferred to the respective TV monitor via the transmission link;
• the selection means comprising automatic selection means including (i) a plurality of detection means for detecting in the microphones a greater-than-threshold speaker-voice level in any microphone, wherein the TV camera associated with any such microphone is selected in the absence of another microphone having a greater-than-threshold voice level;
• and (ii) priority means operative when more than one of said microphones has a greater-than-threshold voice level for selecting one of said more than one microphones in accordance with a predetermined priority order associated with said microphones.