Searching for聽Signs
National Science Foundation grant helps develop a visual dictionary of sign language gestures
Summer 2011 · Comment ·
Assistant Professor Vassilis Athitsos is helping create a Google for sign language.
Dr. Athitsos received a five-year Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop a computer recognition system that will become a visual dictionary for American Sign Language (ASL).
The project aims to automatically annotate, recognize, and index large vocabularies of gestures. To find the meaning of a particular sign, the user would form the sign in front of a camera atop a computer. The recognition system would compare the gesture with thousands of images stored in the computer鈥檚 database, display a selection of similar images, and have the user select the most appropriate meaning.
Athitsos hopes to one day team with producers of ASL dictionaries to make a recognition system downloadable from the Internet. Future iterations of the online sign language dictionary could reflect regional 鈥渄ialects,鈥� he says, because signs can vary throughout the country.
鈥�Our technology could also be applied to other sign languages around the world, as different countries use different signs.鈥�
Athitsos became interested in decoding American Sign Language while taking a college course in the subject.
鈥�I was a horrible student; I had to page through a book and look at the signs until I recognized something,鈥� he says. 鈥淢y professor at the time told me no one had tried to make a computer-based sign lookup system.鈥�
College of Engineering Dean Bill Carroll believes Athitsos鈥� work will have an immediate and positive impact.
鈥�It鈥檚 the kind of practical, real-world research that we land here at UT Arlington,鈥� Dr. Carroll says.