A method for synthesizing animation to transmit sign language by intelligent communication
Jun Xiang Xu, Yoshinao Aoki, Zheng Zhong · Electronics and Communications in Japan (Part III Fundamental Electronic Science) · 1993
Abstract The following intelligent communication system is considered for the transmission of the animation image information. The structural models are prepared both at the transmitter and the receiver. Only the information concerning the motion of the object is transmitted to provide the model with the motion parameters, and the animation image is synthesized. In such a system, the real‐time image synthesis based on the motion parameters is required. This paper aims at the intelligent communication of the sign language image using a personal computer. A method of real‐time synthesis is discussed which is based on the parameter representation of the hand motion and the computer graphics (CG) of the animation image. When the animation image for the human body is to be generated in real‐time, using the three‐dimensional shape model, the real‐time system is difficult to realize at the present stage by a personal computer from the viewpoint of the computation time. An idea is to use the key‐frame figure interpolation (which is a two‐dimensional figure processing) instead of the three‐dimensional shape model to reduce the computation time in generating the animation. However, it is difficult in this method to derive the rotational image of a three‐dimensional object such as the human hand. From such a viewpoint, the stick‐figure model for the upper limb is adopted in this study, aiming at the intelligent transmission of the sign language image. The state of connection of the three‐dimensional segments, which are obtained by the segmentation at the joints, is represented by a vector. The skeleton represented by the vector is shaped appropriately into a geometrical shape. Then, using the three‐dimensional vector representing the skeleton motion, the shapes of the figure, etc., are constructed and the result is projected on the two‐dimensional plane.