New technology to greatly improve video communication tested during dive to Titanic wreck

The COVID-19 pandemic has enormously boosted the acceptance of online video communication—but in some cases very poor transmission good quality, dropouts, and connection failures during meetings or conference calls tax the participants’ endurance. Scientists at Karlsruhe Institute of Technologies (Kit) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have produced a approach for transmitting video conferences over really reduced bandwidth connections, enabling these types of transmissions even below extraordinary circumstances. It was tested all through a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, which lies at a depth of just about 4,000 meters in the North Atlantic.

“Transmitting info from a depth of 4 kilometers as a result of salt h2o devoid of any decline is extremely tough,” says Professor Alex Waibel, who conducts investigate on speech translation at Kit and CMU. Natural problems make it possible for sonar transmission from the submersible to the mom ship at sea-area stage only, due to the fact radio communication does not operate in salt water. The researchers have developed synthetic methods to transform video information into text. The sound recording is to start with converted to textual content in the submersible and then transmitted to the area by sonar seem pulses, exactly where the video clip is reconstructed from the textual content. “The video clip then features a artificial voice that is mapped to the voice of the human being who is talking, so that it appears like the voice of that human being. In addition, the video synthesis is controlled in these types of a way that the lips of the speaker transfer in sync with the seem,” points out Waibel, who has been doing research in speech recognition, speech processing, and speech translation for decades. “In the future, this will aid distant converse in spoken language,” suggests Waibel. However, it is also appropriate for synthesizing video clips in a unique language or for lip-syncing video clips.

The technological innovation examined by Waibel on the wreck of the Titanic builds on many years of revolutionary function in speech translation. Waibel’s developments consist of the Lecture Translator in use at Package to instantly record the lecturer’s speech in lectures and translate the speech indicators at the same time into composed English textual content. This signifies that college students can comply with the lecture on their laptop, smartphone, or tablet.