Félix Bigand


2022

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Synthesis for the Kinematic Control of Identity in Sign Language
Félix Bigand | Elise Prigent | Annelies Braffort
Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology: The Junction of the Visual and the Textual: Challenges and Perspectives

Sign Language (SL) animations generated from motion capture (mocap) of real signers convey critical information about their identity. It has been suggested that this information is mostly carried by statistics of the movements kinematics. Manipulating these statistics in the generation of SL movements could allow controlling the identity of the signer, notably to preserve anonymity. This paper tests this hypothesis by presenting a novel synthesis algorithm that manipulates the identity-specific statistics of mocap recordings. The algorithm produced convincing new versions of French Sign Language discourses, which accurately modulated the identity prediction of a machine learning model. These results open up promising perspectives toward the automatic control of identity in the motion animation of virtual signers.