[Colloquium] 4/29 Thesis Defense: Taehwan Kim

[Mary Marre]

When:     Friday, April 29th at 1:00 pm

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526

Who:      Taehwan Kim, TTIC


Title: American Sign Language Fingerspelling Recognition from Video:
Methods for Unrestricted Recognition and Signer-Independence

Abstract:

In this thesis, we study the problem of recognizing video sequences of
fingerspelled

letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a

significant but relatively understudied part of ASL, and recognizing it is
challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions

that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation

between signers; and there has been a dearth of

continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work, we propose several
types of

recognition approaches, and explore the signer variation problem.

Our best-performing models are segmental (semi-Markov) conditional

random fields using deep neural network-based features. In the

signer-dependent setting, our recognizers achieve up to about 93%

letter accuracy. The signer-independent setting is much more

challenging, but with neural network adaptation we achieve up to 83%

letter accuracies.


Thesis Advisor: Karen Livescu, klivescu at ttic.edu



Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 504*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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