A Retrieval Method for Japanese Signs Using Japanese Verbal Descriptions

One of the inherent problems in constructing the sign language dictionary is how to make retrieval and comparison operations on the visual database of signs. This paper describes a retrieval method, especifically for Japanese signs. This method has a useful capability for flexible retrieval of the sign from a bilingual dictionary. Our method can retrieve similar signs to the given input. The retrieval mechanism is essentially based on similarity between the given verbal description and verbal descriptions in a retrieval database. The similarity measure of verbal descriptions can be considered as the approximations for the similarity of sign motion images. As a results of our experiment, the success ratio of the retrievals is 96% in averages.