HCII PhD Thesis Defense: Brandon Taylor
Speaker
Brandon Taylor
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 3305
Description
Towards the Automatic Translation of American Sign Language
Brandon Taylor
Ph.D. Thesis Proposal
1:00pm NSH July 24th, 2018 NSH 3305
Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Committee:
Dan Siewiorek (Chair)
Anind Dey
Carolyn Rose
Roberta Klatzky
Asim Smailagic
There are estimated to be more than a million Deaf and severely hard of hearing individuals living in the United States. For many of these individuals, American Sign Language (ASL) is their primary means of communication. However, for most day-to-day interactions, native-ASL users must either get by with a mixture of gestures and written communication in a non-native language or seek the assistance of an interpreter. Whereas advances towards automated translation between many other languages have benefitted greatly from decades of research into speech recognition and Statistical Machine Translation, ASL’s lack of aural and written components have limited exploration into automated translation of ASL.
In this thesis, I focus on work towards recognizing components of American Sign Language in real-time. I first evaluate the suitability of a real-time depth-based generative handtracking model for estimating ASL handshapes. I then present a study of ASL Fingerspelling recognition, in which real-time tracking and classification methods are applied to continuous sign sequences. I will then discuss the future steps needed to expand a real-time Fingerspelling recognition to the problem of general ASL recognition.
Host
Queenie Kravitz