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Towards Automated Sign Language Production: A Pipeline for Creating Inclusive Virtual Humans

Published: 11 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In everyday life, Deaf People face barriers because information is often only available in spoken or written language. Producing sign language videos showing a human interpreter is often not feasible due to the amount of data required or because the information changes frequently. The ongoing AVASAG project addresses this issue by developing a 3D sign language avatar for the automatic translation of texts into sign language for public services. The avatar is trained using recordings of human interpreters translating text into sign language. For this purpose, we create a corpus with video and motion capture data and an annotation scheme that allows for real-time translation and subsequent correction without requiring to correct the animation frames manually. This paper presents the general translation pipeline focusing on innovative points, such as adjusting an existing annotation system to the specific requirements of sign language and making it usable to annotators from the Deaf communities.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Deep Neural Labeling: Hybrid Hand Pose Estimation Using Unlabeled Motion Capture Data With Color Gloves in Context of German Sign Language2024 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and eXtended and Virtual Reality (AIxVR)10.1109/AIxVR59861.2024.00009(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2024
  • (2022)Creating Personas for Signing User Populations: An Ability-Based Approach to User Modelling in HCIProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3550364(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022

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          cover image ACM Other conferences
          PETRA '22: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments
          June 2022
          704 pages
          ISBN:9781450396318
          DOI:10.1145/3529190
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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          Publication History

          Published: 11 July 2022

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          Author Tags

          1. annotation
          2. automatic translation.
          3. corpus
          4. motion capture
          5. sign language production

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          • (2024)Deep Neural Labeling: Hybrid Hand Pose Estimation Using Unlabeled Motion Capture Data With Color Gloves in Context of German Sign Language2024 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and eXtended and Virtual Reality (AIxVR)10.1109/AIxVR59861.2024.00009(1-10)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2024
          • (2022)Creating Personas for Signing User Populations: An Ability-Based Approach to User Modelling in HCIProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3550364(1-6)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022

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