A method of multimodal machine sign language translation for natural human-computer interaction

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the possibility of robustness enhancement as applied to an automatic system for isolated signs and sign languages recognition, through the use of the most informative spatiotemporal visual features. The authors present a method for the automatic recognition of gestural information, based on an integrated neural network model, which analyses spatiotemporal visual features: 2D and 3D distances between the palm and the face; the area of the hand and the face intersection; hand configuration; the gender and the age of signers. A 3DResNet-18-based neural network model for hand configuration data extraction was elaborated. Deepface software platform neural network models were embedded in the method in order to extract gender and age-related data. The proposed method was tested on the data from the multimodal corpus of sign language elements TheRuSLan, with the accuracy of 91.14 %. The results of this investigation not only improve the accuracy and robustness of machine sign language translation, but also enhance the naturalness of human-machine interaction in general. Besides that, the results have application in various fields of social services, medicine, education and robotics, as well as different public service centers.

Keywords

• body language
• gesticulation
• machine sign language translation
• naturalness of a communication medium