Techniques to manage a whiteboard for multimedia conference events

A method, comprising:

• receiving an image of a writing surface with pen strokes;
• quantizing each pixel of the image into a predetermined number of colors;
• extracting surface attribute information for the writing surface from the quantized pixels;
• extracting stroke attribute information for the pen strokes from the quantized pixels;
• and
• sending the surface attribute information and the stroke attribute information to a remote computing device for rendering as digital pen strokes on a digital writing surface.

An apparatus, comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory communicatively coupled to the processor, the memory to store a whiteboard manager component operative on the processor to manage whiteboard recording and reproduction operations for a multimedia conference event, the whiteboard manager component comprising:
• an image quantizer module operative to receive an image of a writing surface with pen strokes, and quantize each pixel of the image into a predetermined number of colors;
• an attribute extractor module communicatively coupled to the image quantizer module, the attribute extractor module operative to extract stroke attribute information for the pen strokes from the quantized pixels;
• and
• a whiteboard interface module communicatively coupled to the attribute extractor module, the whiteboard interface module operative to send the stroke attribute information to a meeting console for rendering as digital pen strokes on a digital writing surface.