Analysis of Expressiveness of Portuguese Sign Language Speakers

Abstract

Nowadays, there are several communication gaps that isolate deaf people in several social activities. This work studies the expressiveness of gestures in Portuguese Sign Language (PSL) speakers and their differences between deaf and hearing people. It is a first effort towards the ultimate goal of understanding emotional and behaviour patterns among such populations. In particular, our work designs solutions for the following problems: (i) differentiation between deaf and hearing people, (ii) identification of different conversational topics based on body expressiveness, (iii) identification of different levels of mastery of PSL speakers through feature analysis. With these aims, we build up a complete and novel dataset that reveals the duo-interaction between deaf and hearing people under several conversational topics. Results show high recognition and classification rates.