Better cellphone video for Deaf signers?

If you use American Sign Language (ASL) or another sign language to communicate, how do you participate in the cellphone/mobile phone revolution? You don’t very much. You participate in the texting (and E-mail) revolution using written English or another language, but cellphone video quality isn’t good enough to properly capture the flow of sign languages, including their grammar.

But now University of Washington researchers are working to improve video compression with a project called MobileASL.

What makes this a language-related project is how the researchers are trying to compress the video. They’re exploiting how sign languages are perceived.

With sign languages the face is more important than the hands. When people sign, you look at their faces (with your acute “foveal” vision, as opposed to peripheral vision). The signer’s face carries not only the emotions of the signer but grammatical markers as well. With ASL, markers for yes-no questions, wh-questions (who/what/where/when/why/how), negatives, sentence topics, and conditionals are made with the face. The face also conveys commentary on whether something described is ordinary, of poor quality, and so forth.

Thus, instead of compressing the video evenly, the researchers are compressing the area around the signer’s face a little less and the area around the torso a little more. They’re also using somewhat fewer but higher quality frames of video (PDF research paper).

I hope they have success. I would think companies involved with mobile video phones would be interested in this targeted compression. Even if you’re watching people speaking English on video, you want to see their facial expressions and you just want to see their faces.