Research And Realization On Acquiring Motionemes For Sign Language Synthesis

Links and communication between deaf-general are inevitably established during social life. And sign language is the most important intercommunication method to hearing impaired people. Due to its less frequency in social use, deaf community is greatly restricted to get access to information as well as the degree of integration into society. The goal of sign language synthesis is how to use the language of the deaf group known to represent the mainstream of information, which aims to construct a barrier-free environment. Sign language synthesis system can not only provide deaf community with a platform to acquiring information, but it also can be applied to sign language teaching or service industries to improve learning efficiency. On the other hand, our world is a multi-ethnic society and every nation has its own culture and language. So is sign language. With an increasing participation in social activities, communication among hearing impaired people from different nations and countries is gradually increasing, and more obstacles they faced are laid by various sign language culture. How to realize another barrier-free communication channel between multi-lingual sign language becomes a pressing problem. Based on Chinese sign language synthesis platform, this dissertation proposed a method to realize multi-lingual sign language synthesis by using motionemes, which are basic timing units distracted from gestures according to sign language linguistics. These motionemes not only provide multi-lingual sign languages'intertranslation with reliable data, but also propose a new approach for multi-lingual sign language synthesis application.This dissertation firstly reviews current established synthesis system and multi-lingual sign language synthesis. Considering similar research on motionemes, a formal definition of motionemes is presented, which provides a theory for latter use.In this paper, stress in laid on the acquiring motionemes. An analysis on structure of sign language is conducted guided by sign language linguistics. Based on this, modules used to extract motionemes are developed and a database of motionemes is also established through Chinese sign language synthesis platform.In order to connect multi-lingual sign gesture words with motionemes, sign language experts need to select proper motionemes from database. To provide a visual query interface for motionemes, this paper implements hand shape based and location based query, where those hand shape are defined in HamNoSys and locations are computed by employing forward kinematics. This interface improves work efficiency.