Hands0n
16th February 2007, 06:09 PM
An interesting article on the Beeb today - and utterly pointless use of the technology unless the mobile network operators get the price of Videocalling down to more realistic rates. And by that I mean on a par with Voicecalling. Imagine the scenario where Videocalling is more expensive, in the context of this article, and thus the Deaf are financially penalised for "talking" to each other via the mobile networks.
It would take decades for the regulators to provision for the Deaf - have the mobile network operators the courage and will to do this all by themselves, and thus open up to an untapped market?
Deaf to sign via video handsets
Deaf people could soon be using video mobiles to chat with their friends using sign language.
Video compression tools made by US researchers make it possible to send live pictures of people signing across low bandwidth mobile networks.
The system cuts down on the bandwidth needed by only sending data about which parts of each frame have changed.
The researchers are talking to mobile firms about how to get the technology in to the hands of deaf people.
Long look
Many American deaf people prefer to communicate via sign language but this is impossible over current mobile networks, said University of Washington computer scientist Richard Ladner who is one of the principal investigators on the project.
Chatting via signing across mobile networks was impossible, said Prof Ladner, because the bandwidth available means video was too low quality to accurately depict the arm, finger and face movements of sign language.
While video compression techniques could ease this problem there were other barriers too, said Prof Ladner.
"To do all this calculation and video compression runs down your battery pretty fast," he said.
The team are working on ways to get the software on to handsets
Prof Ladner and his co-researchers Professor Eve Riskin and Professor Sheila Hemami have overcome these problems by creating compression software that looks for the parts of each video frame important to signers.
To cut down on the amount of data that has to be sent video compression systems typically only send information about what elements of a scene change from frame to frame.
By contrast the system developed by Prof Ladner and his co-workers only looks for hand, arm and face movements. In addition it ensures that the face of a signer, where movements during signing are quite subtle, is presented in more detail.
"The large, slower movements of hands and arms can be picked up at low fidelity," said Prof Ladner, "the face needs higher fidelity because the movements are much smaller."
This approach also made sense, he said, because people interpreting sign language look at the face of the signer 95% of the time.
This lets the peripheral vision pick up the gross movements of arms and hands while the fovea, the part of the retina capable of picking out detail, concentrates on the smaller facial actions.
The system developed by the team can work across networks that only have 10-20 kilobits per second of bandwidth available, said Prof Ladner. In the UK most people are on mobile networks that offer them about 40kbps download speed but much less than this to upload.
The research has gone so well that the team is in talks with handset makers and operators to put it on phones.
"We realised that the technology is close enough that we can deploy it," he said.
Article Source BBC Technology News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6366177.stm)
The crying pity of all this is that, probably because it is American, the very glaringly obvious use of 3G for the transport has been completely missed [at least in the article]. No such problems of data capacity exist in terms of the article - 3G is a solution waiting for this particular problem.
Do the boffins really not see it, the bleeding obvious?
It would take decades for the regulators to provision for the Deaf - have the mobile network operators the courage and will to do this all by themselves, and thus open up to an untapped market?
Deaf to sign via video handsets
Deaf people could soon be using video mobiles to chat with their friends using sign language.
Video compression tools made by US researchers make it possible to send live pictures of people signing across low bandwidth mobile networks.
The system cuts down on the bandwidth needed by only sending data about which parts of each frame have changed.
The researchers are talking to mobile firms about how to get the technology in to the hands of deaf people.
Long look
Many American deaf people prefer to communicate via sign language but this is impossible over current mobile networks, said University of Washington computer scientist Richard Ladner who is one of the principal investigators on the project.
Chatting via signing across mobile networks was impossible, said Prof Ladner, because the bandwidth available means video was too low quality to accurately depict the arm, finger and face movements of sign language.
While video compression techniques could ease this problem there were other barriers too, said Prof Ladner.
"To do all this calculation and video compression runs down your battery pretty fast," he said.
The team are working on ways to get the software on to handsets
Prof Ladner and his co-researchers Professor Eve Riskin and Professor Sheila Hemami have overcome these problems by creating compression software that looks for the parts of each video frame important to signers.
To cut down on the amount of data that has to be sent video compression systems typically only send information about what elements of a scene change from frame to frame.
By contrast the system developed by Prof Ladner and his co-workers only looks for hand, arm and face movements. In addition it ensures that the face of a signer, where movements during signing are quite subtle, is presented in more detail.
"The large, slower movements of hands and arms can be picked up at low fidelity," said Prof Ladner, "the face needs higher fidelity because the movements are much smaller."
This approach also made sense, he said, because people interpreting sign language look at the face of the signer 95% of the time.
This lets the peripheral vision pick up the gross movements of arms and hands while the fovea, the part of the retina capable of picking out detail, concentrates on the smaller facial actions.
The system developed by the team can work across networks that only have 10-20 kilobits per second of bandwidth available, said Prof Ladner. In the UK most people are on mobile networks that offer them about 40kbps download speed but much less than this to upload.
The research has gone so well that the team is in talks with handset makers and operators to put it on phones.
"We realised that the technology is close enough that we can deploy it," he said.
Article Source BBC Technology News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6366177.stm)
The crying pity of all this is that, probably because it is American, the very glaringly obvious use of 3G for the transport has been completely missed [at least in the article]. No such problems of data capacity exist in terms of the article - 3G is a solution waiting for this particular problem.
Do the boffins really not see it, the bleeding obvious?