Systems For Supporting Deaf People In Viewing Sports Programs By Using Sign Language Animation Synthesis

In this paper, we propose display systems for supporting deaf and hard of hearing people in viewing sports programs by using Japanese Sign Language (JSL) animation synthesis. The synthesis can automatically produce JSL CG animation from live sports data during a game. We improved the synthesis to make sports-specific collocated motions by compounding several word motions. Utilizing the improved synthesis, we developed three prototype systems for displaying JSL CG animation and live sports video simultaneously: a web browser-based system, tablet application-based system and a tablet & TV system. We carried out a series of experiments to evaluate these systems by using real-time data from actual games, and the tablet & TV system was most preferred.