A Low Cost and Efficient Sign Language Video Transmission System

In this paper we propose a video in video hiding technique for embedding and transmission of sign language video signal through another video communication channel. Our proposed system does not need modification of the main video coding and transmission system, and it can be implemented by addition of a pre- and post-processing block. We encode the sign language video and embed the encoded bit-stream in the main host video. We develop a low complexity and robust encoding scheme for sign language video by applying three-dimensional wavelet decomposition on the sign language video, and encoding the important subbands using multiple description scalar quantizers. We also apply three-dimensional wavelet decomposition on the host video and embed the encoded bit-stream of the sign language video in the host signal subbands. We select blocks of the host video with high texture content and embed the information in the middle frequency subbands to have highest robustness and with low visible distortion. At the receiver the system reconstructs the sign language video by recovering the embedded data in subbands. We examine the system performance by embedding video sequences of sign language messages into host video sequences. At the receiver we evaluate the percentage of correct sign language messages recovery. We further evaluate the system performance when the host video undergone compression and addition of noise during transmission.