Computer Engineering Commons^™

Automated Technique For Real-Time Production Of Lifelike Animations Of American Sign Language, John Mcdonald, Rosalee Wolfe, Jerry C. Schnepp, Julie Hochgesang, Diana Gorman Jamrozik, Marie Stumbo, Larwan Berke, Melissa Bialek, Farah Thomas

Jerry C Schnepp

Generating sentences from a library of signs implemented through a sparse set of key frames derived from the segmental structure of a phonetic model of ASL has the advantage of flexibility and efficiency, but lacks the lifelike detail of motion capture. These difficulties are compounded when faced with real-time generation and display. This paper describes a technique for automatically adding realism without the expense of manually animating the requisite detail. The new technique layers transparently over and modifies the primary motions dictated by the segmental model, and does so with very little computational cost, enabling real-time production and display. The …