The Virtual Humans Group at UEA has an international reputation in Avatar Animation with specific application to Deaf Sign Language. The main focus of the work is the development of notations for describing signing gestures and generation of realistic animation from transcriptions using such notations.

Through the Dicta-Sign project, the group has access to a developing parallel corpus of sign language materials for four European sign languages, annotated at varying levels of detail with information that can be used both for linguistic analysis and resynthesis of the original performance. A number of tools have been developed using computational image and linguistic processing to automate a range of annotation tasks.

There are opportunities for PhD study for students with a strong background in one or more of computer vision processing, computer graphics, computing science, and computational linguistics. The focus of the work will be to survey the limitations of existing animation systems and research additional capabilities required for an improved gesture notation. The aim will be to enhance the quality and realism of generated sign language, based on analysis of corpus data through vision and linguistic processing.

Potential applicants interested in this topic or related research are encouraged to contact the primary supervisor and see http://vh.cmp.uea.ac.uk for further information

For further information, visit this link.