LSF-ANIMAL: A Motion Capture Corpus in French Sign Language Designed for the Animation of Signing Avatars

Signing avatars allow deaf people to access information in their preferred language using an interactive visualization of the sign language spatio-temporal content. However, avatars are often procedurally animated, resulting in robotic and unnatural movements, which are therefore rejected by the community for which they are intended. To overcome this lack of authenticity, solutions in which the avatar is animated from motion capture data are promising. Yet, the initial data set drastically limits the range of signs that the avatar can produce. Therefore, it can be interesting to enrich the initial corpus with new content by editing the captured motions. For this purpose, we collected the LSF-ANIMAL corpus, a French Sign Language (LSF) corpus composed of captured isolated signs and full sentences that can be used both to study LSF features and to generate new signs and utterances. This paper presents the precise definition and content of this corpus, technical considerations relative to the motion capture process (including the marker set definition), the post-processing steps required to obtain data in a standard motion format and the annotation scheme used to label the data. The quality of the corpus with respect to intelligibility, accuracy and realism is perceptually evaluated by 41 participants including native LSF signers.