Quantifying the effect of disruptions to temporal coherence on the intelligibility of compressed American Sign Language video

Communication of American Sign Language (ASL) over mobile phones would be very beneficial to the Deaf community. ASL video encoded to achieve the rates provided by current cellular networks must be heavily compressed and appropriate assessment techniques are required to analyze the intelligibility of the compressed video. As an extension to a purely spatial measure of intelligibility, this paper quantifies the effect of temporal compression artifacts on sign language intelligibility. These artifacts can be the result of motion-compensation errors that distract the observer or frame rate reductions. They reduce the the perception of smooth motion and disrupt the temporal coherence of the video. Motion-compensation errors that affect temporal coherence are identified by measuring the block-level correlation between co-located macroblocks in adjacent frames. The impact of frame rate reductions was quantified through experimental testing. A subjective study was performed in which fluent A...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: HVEI
• Authors: Frank M. Ciaramello, Sheila S. Hemami
• Keywords: Emerging Technology, Frame Rates, HVEI 2009, Motion-compensation Errors, Rate Reductions