Avatar animation from SignWriting notation

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Date

2015

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University of the Western Cape

Abstract

The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape is in the process of developing a machine translation system that can translate fully-fledged phrases between South African Sign Language (SASL) and English in real-time.To visualise sign language,the system aims to make use of a 3D humanoid avatar created by van Wyk. Moemedi used this avatar to create an animation system that visualises a small set of simple Phrases from very simple SignWriting notation input. This research aims to achieve an animation system that can render full sign language sentences given complex SignWriting notation glyphs with multiple sections. The specific focus of the research is achieving animations that are accurate representations of the SignWriting input in terms of the five fundamental parameters of sign language, namely, hand motion, location, orientation and shape, as well as non-manual features such as facial expressions. An experiment Was carried out to determine the accuracy of the proposed system on a set of 20 SASL phrases annotated with SignWriting notation. It was found that the proposed system is highly accurate, achieving an average accuracy of 81.6%.

Description

>Magister Scientiae - MSc

Keywords

Animation, Humanoid avatar, Key frame animation, SignWriting

Citation