This paper describes some of the experiences the authors have had collecting continuous motion capture data on Finnish Sign Language in the motion capture laboratory of the Department of Music at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Monologue and dialogue data have been recorded with an eight-camera optical motion capture system by tracking, at a frame rate of 120 Hz, the three-dimensional locations of small ball-shaped reflective markers attached to the signer’s hands, arms, head, and torso. The main question from the point of view of data recording concerns marker placement, while the main themes discussed concerning data processing include gap-filling (i.e. the process of interpolating the information of missing frames on the basis of surrounding frames) and the importing of data into ELAN for subsequent segmentation (e.g. into signs and sentences). The paper will also demonstrate how the authors have analyzed the continuous motion capture data from the kinematic perspective.
@inproceedings{jantunen:12003:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Jantunen, Tommi and Burger, Birgitta and De Weerdt, Danny and Seilola, Irja and Wainio, Tuija},
title = {Experiences collecting motion capture data on continuous signing},
pages = {75--82},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon},
maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
day = {27},
month = may,
year = {2012},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12003.pdf}
}