Enhanced Level Building Algorithm for the Movement Epenthesis Problem in Sign Language Recognition

One of the hard problems in automated sign language recognition is the movement epenthesis (me) problem. Movement epenthesis is the gesture movement that bridges two consecutive signs. This effect can be over a long duration and involve variations in hand shape, position, and movement, making it hard to explicitly model these intervening segments. This creates a problem when trying to match individual signs to full sign sentences since for many chunks of the sentence, corresponding to these mes, we do not have models. We present an approach based on version of a dynamic programming framework, called Level Building, to simultaneously segment and match signs to continuous sign language sentences in the presence of movement epenthesis (me). We enhance the classical Level Building framework so that it can accommodate me labels for which we do not have explicit models. This enhanced Level Building algorithm is then coupled with a trigram grammar model to optimally segment and label sign language sentences. We demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm using a single view video dataset of continuous sign language sentences. We obtain 83% word level recognition rate with the enhanced Level Building approach, as opposed to a 20% recognition rate using a classical Level Building framework on the same dataset. The proposed approach is novel since it does not need explicit models for movement epenthesis.