Robust region of interest coding for improved sign language telecommunication.

More than 500,000 deaf people in North America use American Sign Language or a similar signed system as a first language. Long-distance communication of this visually based medium is hampered by its incompatibility with audio and text telecommunication systems. Movements associated with signed languages require a more consistent and higher frame rate than is available with residential video telephony. New video compression standards (JPEG 2000 and MPEG-4) allow optional region of interest coding in which areas within a frame can be assigned different levels of compression. This paper presents a novel skin color segmentation approach that identifies the hands and face each video frame. This method is robust in terms of variations in skin pigmentation in a single subject, in skin pigmentation across a population of potential users, subject clothing, and image background. Specifying these critical regions of interest to the compression algorithm maintains high visual quality in the regions of the hands and face, while allowing very lossy, high compression of the remainder of the video frame. This reduces the coded representation of each frame, and offers a potential increase in the frame rate for telecommunication.