Studentsky projekt

Z CoUnSiL: Videokonferenční prostředí pro vzdálené tlumočení znakového jazyka
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Studentský projekt

About

CoUnSil demonstration for Teiresias - class
CoUnSil demonstration for Teiresias - interpreter

CoUnSiL is a project aiming to provide support for the integration of hearing impaired into regular university education. Namely, we assess the problem of scarcity of skilled sign language interpreters with technical background needed to provide translation to sign language at a professional level.

One way to bridge this gap is creating a videoconferencing channel between the classes of students and teachers and remote interpreters. However, to make this work, the channel needs to be of sufficient quality and latency for the sign language to be transferred in real time - quality beyond the capabilities of standard videoconferencing environments. Furthermore, the system requires specific tailoring for the user's needs, such as the capability of asking to talk for the students and user-specific layouts that convey precisely the needed information. Creating such a complex videoconferencing environment, with many high-quality channels while keeping the latency low enough for effective real time interaction is the goal of the CoUnSiL project.

Related Research

The Laboratory of Advanced networking technologies has long been developing two tools for high quality and low latency multimedia transfers over common network infrastructure: CoUniverse and UltraGrid. CoUniverse (standing for the CoUn in the project name) is a middleware for orchestration of videoconferencing environments (configuration, application running and transfer route planning) and their assembly from individual point-to-point transfers. UltraGrid on the other hand is a tool for the actual point-to-point multimedia transfers with low latency and high quality, with a wide scale of resolutions and compression formats. UltraGrid supports point-to-multipoint transfers through the use of a packer mirror, which is a part of UltraGrid distribution packages. Both UltraGrid and CoUniverse are distributed under the free BSD license.

Further information about UltraGrid is available at it's webpage and wiki. More information on the CoUniverse system can be also acquired from it's webpage.

To get further information about other interesting projects taking place at the Laboratory of Advanced Networking technologies, see it's webpage.

Project status

Multiple preparatory workings have been conducted to integrate the aforementioned tools and set the stage for the project. The packet mirror originally designed for maximum bandwidth was upgraded to be able to configure groups of receivers in one instance with a minimum performance loss. To deal with the specific display layouts for different participants, a multi-platform JAVA library WDDMan was developed, that allows positioning and manipulation with on-screen windows. Lastly, an analysis and design of the system was conducted based on the user requirements. The integration of all those tools into the CoUnSiL system is currently pending approval for financing as a student research and development project at Masaryk University.

More information and a stable release of the open source WDDMan library is available on it's webpage. The WDDMan library is a product of the Bachelor's Thesis of Jaromír Kala.

The analysis and design of the system was the theme of the Bachelor's Thesis by Milan Seman.

Downloads

The jar file: CoUnSiL 0.9.jar.

The source code: CoUnSiL 0.9 src.zip.

Resources

Internal stuff only.

Literature review