An Avatar-Based Weather Forecast Sign Language System for the Hearing-Impaired
In this paper, we describe a text-to-animation framework for TV weather forecast sign language presentation. To this end, we analyzed the last three years’ weather forecast scripts to obtain the frequency of each word and determine the order of motion capture. About 500 sign language words were chosen and motion-captured for the weather forecast purpose, in addition to the existing 2,700 motions prebuilt for daily life. Words that are absent in the sign language dictionary are replaced with synonyms registered in KorLex, the Korean Wordnet, to improve the translation performance. The weather forecast with sign language is serviced via the Internet in an on-demand manner and can be viewed by PC or mobile devices.