A Signing space model for the interpretation of sign language interactions

Sign language processing is often performed by processing each individual sign. Such an approach relies on an exhaustive description of the signs and does not take into account the spatial structure of the sentence. In this paper, we will present a general model of sign language sentences that uses the construction of the signing space as a representation of both the meaning and the realization of the sentence. We will propose a computational model of this construction and explain how it can be attached to a sign language grammar model to help analysis of sign language utterances. We describe the architecture of an image analysis system that performs sign language analysis by means of a prediction/verification approach. The system uses the model of sign language structure during analysis for predicting visual events, so that simple 2D features can be used to determine whether the image corroborates the prediction or not. Key-Words: Sign Language, Signing space, gesture description, image analysis, interaction