• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1034-1037
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• 2009

Sign language spotting is the task of detecting the start and end points of signs from continuous data and recognizing the detected signs in the predefined vocabulary. The difficulty with sign language spotting is that instances of signs vary in both motion and shape. Moreover, signs have variable motion in terms of both trajectory and length. Especially, variable sign lengths result in problems with spotting signs in a video sequence, because short signs involve less information and fewer changes than long signs. In this paper, we propose a method for spotting variable lengths signs based on semi-CRF (semi-Markov Conditional Random Field). We performed experiments with ASL (American Sign Language) and KSL (Korean Sign Language) dataset of continuous sign sentences to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms both HMM and CRF.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.82-91
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• 2009

Sign language spotting is the task of detecting and recognizing the signs in a signed utterance. The difficulty of sign language spotting is that the occurrences of signs vary in both motion and shape. Moreover, the signs appear within a continuous gesture stream, interspersed with transitional movements between signs in a vocabulary and non-sign patterns(which include out-of-vocabulary signs, epentheses, and other movements that do not correspond to signs). In this paper, a novel method for designing a threshold model in a conditional random field(CRF) model is proposed. The proposed model performs an adaptive threshold for distinguishing between signs in the vocabulary and non-sign patterns. A hand appearance-based sign verification method, a short-sign detector, and a subsign reasoning method are included to further improve sign language spotting accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method can detect signs from continuous data with an 88% spotting rate and can recognize signs from isolated data with a 94% recognition rate, versus 74% and 90% respectively for CRFs without a threshold model, short-sign detector, subsign reasoning, and hand appearance-based sign verification.