Enhanced Level Building Algorithm for the Movement Epenthesis Problem in Sign Language Recognition

One of the hard problems in automated sign language recognition is the movement epenthesis (me) problem. Movement epenthesis is the gesture movement that bridges two consecutive signs. This effect can be over a long duration and involve variations in hand shape, position, and movement, making it hard to explicitly model these intervening segments. This creates a problem when trying to match individual signs to full sign sentences since for many chunks of the sentence, corresponding to these mes, we do not have models. We present an approach based on version of a dynamic programming framework, called Level Building, to simulataneously segment and match signs to continuous sign language sentences in the presence of movement epenthesis (me). We enhance the classical Level Building framework so that it can accomodate me labels for which we do not have explicit models. This enhanced Level Building algroithm is then coupled with a trigram grammar model to optimally segment and label sign la...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Ruiduo Yang, Sudeep Sarkar, Barbara L. Loeding
• Keywords: Classical Level Building, Computer Vision, CVPR 2007, Enhanced Level Building, Level Building Framework, Movement Epenthesis, Sign Language Sentences