IEEE Computer Society

Rochester Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society

IEEE

presents

Human Computer Communication Using Sign Language

by

Professor Sudeep Sarkar

University of South Florida, Tampa


Date: March 31, 2010, Wednesday
Time: 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Location: RIT, 70-1400 Auditorium in the lobby of GCCIS
Computer Society announcements and venue information: https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/rochester/computer
Cost: Free. Open to IEEE members and non-members.
Please directly request interpreting services early for event 5190 or email John.Sweeney@RIT.edu for interpreting support.

ASL + Computer

Abstract

Professor Sudeep Sarkar of the University of South Florida will introduce automated computer algorithms for recognition of sign language. This kind of ability would be useful in facilitating communication between Deaf and hearing persons, mediated by a computing device coupled with cameras. The scientific goal is recognition of continuous signs in short sentences based on video, without the use of special equipment such as data gloves or magnetic markers. The focus of the talk will be on the design of scalable formalisms for representation, model learning, and matching methods that are robust to image segmentation errors.

Guided by audience interest, the talk will explore a subset of the representations and approaches that

  1. Capture the global (Gestalt) configuration of hand and face relationship using relational distributions.
  2. Learn, without supervision, sign models from examples using automated common motif extraction using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.
  3. Automatically segment an ASL sentence into signs using Conditional Random Fields.

Speaker Biography

Sudeep Sarkar (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1988. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering, on a University Presidential Fellowship, from The Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Since 1993, he has been with the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include perceptual organization in single images and multiple image sequences, automated sign language recognition, biometrics and nano-computing.


Speaker's Web Site: https://www.cse.usf.edu/~sarkar/