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MobileASL
The wireless telephone network has inadvertently excluded over one million deaf or hard of hearing Americans. While the Deaf Community uses text messaging or video relay services (where a remote interpreter translates video sign language to spoken English), neither service offers the portable convenience of the wireless phone network.
With the advent of cell phone PDAs with larger screens and photo/video capture, people who communicate with American Sign Language (ASL) could utilize these new technologies. However, due to the low bandwidth of the wireless telephone network, even today's best video encoders likely cannot produce the quality video needed for intelligible ASL. Instead, a new real time video compression scheme is needed to transmit within the existing wireless network. In addition to bandwidth and real-time constraints, video quality must allow users to understand semantics of ASL with ease. For this technology to exist in the immediate future, the MobileASL project is designing new ASL encoders that are compatible with the new H.264/AVC compression standard (nearly doubling compression ratios of MPEG-2) that can eventually be used on video cell phones. The result will be a video compression metric that takes into account empirically validated visual and perceptual processes that occur during conversations in American Sign Language.
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