Paula Dornhofer Paro Costa

Compact 2D facial animation based on context-dependent visemes

The expansion of mobile communications and the technological evolution of portable devices, raised new applications possibilities that demands the development of more efficient and intuitive interfaces.

Signing avatars: making education more inclusive

In Brazil, there are approximately 9.7 million inhabitants who are deaf or hard of hearing. Moreover, about 30% of the Brazilian deaf community is illiterate in Brazilian Portuguese due to difficulties to offer deaf children an inclusive environment based on bilingual education. Currently, the prevailing teaching practice depends heavily on verbal language and on written material, making the inclusion of the deaf a challenging task. This paper presents the author’s approach for tackling this problem and improving deaf students’ accessibility to written material in order to help them master Brazilian Portuguese as a second language. We describe an ongoing project aimed at developing an automatic Brazilian Portuguese-to-Libras translation system that presents the translated content via an animated virtual human, or avatar. The paper describes the methodology adopted to compile a source language corpus having the deaf student needs in central focus. It also describes the construction of a parallel Brazilian Portuguese/Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) corpus based on motion capture technology. The envisioned translation architecture includes the definition of an Intermediate Language to drive the signing avatar. The results of a preliminary assessment of signs intelligibility highlight the application potential.

Towards interactive conversational talking heads

This work is part of the long term project of the Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation (DCA) of University of Campinas of developing videorealistic interactive conversational agents to provide more intuitive and efficient human-computer communication. The projects from this group include the development of a compact image-based avatar for limited memory and processing capabilities devices, multiple purpose 3D talking-heads and a sign language 3D virtual agent.