Sign language recognition models require extensive training data. Effectively anonymizing such data remains a complex endeavor due to the crucial role of facial features. While pose estimation techniques have traditionally been considered a means of yielding anonymized data, the findings reported in this paper challenge this assumption: We conducted a study involving Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) users, presenting them with pose estimates from DSGS video samples. The participants' task was to identify the signers' language levels and identities from skeletal representations. Our findings reveal that the extent to which sign language users were capable of recognizing familiar signers depended on their language level, with deaf experts achieving the highest accuracy. We demonstrate that an automatic classifier obtains comparable results in multi-label language level recognition (F1=0.64) and person identification (F1=0.31). This emphasizes the need to reconsider the fundamentals of video anonymization towards guaranteeing sign language users' privacy.
@inproceedings{battisti:24025:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Battisti, Alessia and van den Bold, Emma and G{\"o}hring, Anne and Holzknecht, Franz and Ebling, Sarah},
title = {Person Identification from Pose Estimates in Sign Language},
pages = {209--221},
editor = {Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Mesch, Johanna and Schulder, Marc},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC-COLING} 2024 11th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Evaluation of Sign Language Resources},
maintitle = {2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC-COLING} 2024)},
publisher = {{ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)}},
address = {Torino, Italy},
day = {25},
month = may,
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-2-493814-30-2},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/24025.pdf}
}
| van den Bold, Emma