A Gesture-Emotion Keyframe Editor for sign-Language Communication between Avatars of Korean and Japanese on the Internet

The sign-language tan be used a9 an auxiliary communication means between avatars of different languages. At that time an intelligent communication method can be also utilized to achieve real-time communication, where intelligently coded data (joint angles for arm gestures and action units for facial emotions) are transmitted instead of real pictures. In this paper we design a gesture-emotion keyframe editor to provide the means to get easily the parameter values. To calculate both joint angles of the arms and the hands and to goner-ate the in keyframes realistically, a transformation matrix of inverse kinematics and some kinds of constraints are applied. Also, to edit emotional expressions efficiently, a comic-style facial model having only eyebrows, eyes nose, and mouth is employed. Experimental results show a possibility that the editor could be used for intelligent sign-language image communications between different lan-guages.