Collaborative Research: A Framework for Encoding American Sign Language and Other Structured Video

具有视频功能的手机有可能使失聪的美国人能够用他们社区的母语美国手语（ASL）说话，并获得无线电话革命的自由，灵活性和舒适性。这项研究涉及新的标准兼容的数据压缩方法，将允许ASL视频，和其他结构化视频，通过低带宽的手机信道传输的设计，实施和评估。 更具体地说，本研究的目标是开发一个框架，在其中实现低复杂度的H.264编码，以提供最高质量的压缩结构化视频。 由于开发的算法将符合H.264标准，因此可以使用现成的H.264解码器。该研究适用于任何类别的视频，其中存在一些可以利用的固有结构。 本论文的主要研究内容包括：（1）为ASL设计一个合适的客观失真度量;（2）设计用于在小型设备上显示的视频预处理算法;（3）开发利用视频结构进行高效编码的方法;（4）利用新的失真度量实现H.264的率失真复杂度优化;（5）设计一个用于在小型设备上显示的视频预处理算法。以及（5）该框架在其他结构化视频（如监控视频）中的应用。 与ASL用户的研究被用来开发客观的可懂度指标，并评估新的压缩技术。

Video-enabled cell phones have the potential to enable deaf Americans to speak in their community's native language, American Sign Language (ASL), and gain the freedom, flexibility, and comfort of the wireless phone revolution. This research involves the design, implementation, and evaluation of new standards-compliant data compression methods that will allow ASL video, and other structured video, to be transmitted over low bandwidth cell phone channels. To be more specific, the goal of this research is to develop a framework in which to implement low-complexity H.264 encoding to provide maximum quality compressed structured video. Because the developed algorithms will be H.264 standard-compliant, an off-the-shelf H.264 decoder can be used.The research applies to any class of videos where there is some inherent structure that can be exploited. The five areas of research are: (1) Design of an appropriate objective distortion metric for ASL; (2) Design of algorithms to preprocess video for display on small devices; (3) Development of methods to exploit structure in video for efficient coding; (4) Implementation of a rate-distortion-complexity optimization of H.264 using the new metric; and (5) Applications of the framework to other structured video such as surveillance video. Studies with ASL users are used to develop the objective intelligibility metric and to evaluate the new compression techniques.