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Recognition of Affective and Grammatical Facial Expressions: A Study for Brazilian Sign Language

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Book cover Computer Vision – ECCV 2020 Workshops (ECCV 2020)

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Abstract

Individuals with hearing impairment typically face difficulties in communicating with hearing individuals and during the acquisition of reading and writing skills. Widely adopted by the deaf, Sign Language (SL) has a grammatical structure where facial expressions assume grammatical and affective functions, differentiate lexical items, participate in syntactic construction, and contribute to intensification processes. Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) technology supports the communication between deaf and hearing individuals, translating sign language gestures into written or spoken sentences of a target language. The recognition of facial expressions can improve ASLR accuracy rates. There are cases where the absence of a facial expression can create wrong translations, making them necessary for the understanding of sign language. This paper presents an approach to facial recognition for sign language. Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) is used as a case study. In our approach, we code Libras’ facial expression using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). In the paper, we evaluate two convolutional neural networks, a standard CNN and hybrid CNN+LSTM, for AU recognition. We evaluate the models on a challenging real-world video dataset of facial expressions in Libras. The results obtained were 0.87 f1-score average and indicated the potential of the system to recognize Libras’ facial expressions.

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Acknowledgement

This paper and the research behind was financially supported by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

    Emely Pujólli da Silva, Paula Dornhofer Paro Costa & José Mario De Martino

  2. Federal University of ABC, Santo André, Brazil

    Kate Mamhy Oliveira Kumada

  3. Seli Institute, São Paulo, Brazil

    Gabriela Araújo Florentino

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  1. Emely Pujólli da Silva
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  2. Paula Dornhofer Paro Costa
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  3. Kate Mamhy Oliveira Kumada
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  4. José Mario De Martino
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  5. Gabriela Araújo Florentino
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Correspondence to Emely Pujólli da Silva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Clermont Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand, France

    Adrien Bartoli

  2. Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy

    Andrea Fusiello

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da Silva, E.P., Costa, P.D.P., Kumada, K.M.O., De Martino, J.M., Florentino, G.A. (2020). Recognition of Affective and Grammatical Facial Expressions: A Study for Brazilian Sign Language. In: Bartoli, A., Fusiello, A. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2020 Workshops. ECCV 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12536. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66096-3_16

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