Smart Cropping

The streams displayed in Gallery View are all a square aspect ratio instead of any VGA or HD resolution provided by the user’s webcam. Lync uses a new feature called Smart Cropping, which locates the user’s face within the video stream and centers a square crop around the face, removing any extra space in the video around the actual person. This is to ensure that both streams have a similar size and resolution while they are viewed in the side-by-side Gallery View. The feature is dynamic so if a user shifts positions within her seat, the smart crop will follow the user’s face and adjust to ensure that she is still centered in the video stream.

The original release of Lync 2013 always cropped the user in meetings, but a later update added the option for users to control the cropping behavior. Lync Server 2013 has logic to detect if the source device is a Polycom CX5000, previously known as the Microsoft Roundtable, and automatically use a widescreen format, but basic webcams don’t provide this logic.