Feasibility of Face Animation on Mobile Phones for Deaf Users

Mobile telephone systems have made a fantastic progress in general, but deaf people are practically excluded from the benefits of mobiles. Our aim was to develop a new communication aid for deaf users. Our system directly converts the audio speech signal into the video of animated face, so the deaf users can receive voice messages by lip-reading. Our system was implemented and tested in a PC environment earlier. This paper reports on the implementation on mobile phones and PDAs. The implementation problems and the potential steps for further improvements are also discussed.