WELCOME TO EJ's HOME PAGE

I am a research fellow at the Centre for Exploration Targeting and an adjunct research fellow at the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering within the University of Western Australia.  At the Computer Science school I gained my BSc(Hons) in 1989, MSc in 1992 and PhD in 1997. 

Research

My research focus is on achieving automatic two-way translation between sign and spoken languages using computer vision and graphics techniques.  The deaf community in Australia uses a sign language is called Auslan.  The translation of English into Auslan requires robust speech recognition,  facial expression recognition, as well as a graphical sign display.  The reverse translation that is from Auslan into English requires the visual recognition of signing gestures.  This research was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), and is led by  Professor Robyn Owens.

The main focus of the current research includes the following:

We developed a sign visualisation system that uses a computer-generated 3D human model to display Auslan Signs .  This visualisation system has a interactive tutorial interface, namely the Auslan Tuition System that helps people learn Auslan.  The Auslan Tuition System generates sign motion in real-time and runs on a domestic PC without a specific harware, and is adaptable to other sign languages.  This sytem was released as a public domain software downloadable from the Internet since July 2004.  The Auslan Tuition System received a Commendation in the Innovation Category of the WA Information Technology and Communications Award 2004.
(Collaborators: Robyn Owens, Jason Wong, Sam Yeates, Nick Lowe, James Strauss)
Our sign recognition system recognises Auslan phrases by tracking two hands and the face of a signer; extracting visual features that are invariant to scaling, 2D rotations and the signing speed; and recognising sign phrases using hidden Markov models.  With a known colloquial grammar, the system achieved over a 97% recognition rate for sign phrases.
(Collaborators: Robyn Owens, Gareth Lee)