Continuous Profile Models in ASL Syntactic Facial Expression Synthesis

To create accessible content for deaf users, we investigate automatically synthesizing animations of American Sign Language (ASL), including grammatically important facial expressions and head movements. Based on recordings of humans performing various types of syntactic face and head movements (which include idiosyncratic variation), we evaluate the efficacy of Continuous Profile Models (CPMs) at identifying an essential “latent trace” of the performance, for use in producing ASL animations. A metric-based evaluation and a study with deaf users indicated that this approach was more effective than a prior method for producing animations.