Improving Compressed Video Sign Language Conversations in the Presence of Data Loss

The goal of the MobileASL (American Sign Language) research project is to enable sign language communication over the U.S. cellular network, which is low bandwidth and lossy. Data loss can greatly impact the quality of compressed video because of temporal and spatial error propagation. We investigate techniques to minimize the effect of data loss for improving compressed video sign language conversations. As both computational power and bandwidth are limited on cellular devices, we must carefully allocate these resources. Specifically we focus on utilizing feedback to recover from data loss.