Towards Realistic Sign Language Animations

Current signing avatars are often described as unnatural as they cannot accurately reproduce all the subtleties of synchronized body behaviors of a human signer. In this paper, we investigate a new dynamic approach for transitions between signs and the effect of mouthing behaviors. Although native signers preferred animations with dynamic transitions, we did not find significant differences in comprehension and perceived naturalness scores. On the other hand, we show that including mouthing behaviors improved comprehension and perceived naturalness for novice Portuguese sign language learners.