Towards a 3D signing avatar from SignWriting notation

Abstract

Many transcription systems, like SignWriting, have been suggested in the last decades to describe sign language in a written form. But, these systems have some limitations, they are not easily understood and adopted by the members of deaf community who usually use video and avatar-based systems to access information. In this context, we present in this paper a new tool for automatically generating 3D animation sequences from SW notation. The SW notation is provided as input in an XML based format called SWML (SignWriting Markup Language). This tool aims to improve the reading and writing capabilities of a deaf person who has no special training to read and write in SL. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.