Gesture Synthesis Based on Virtual Newscaster for Broadcast TV News Programs

How to develop avatar displaying system based on Chinese sign language synthesis technology for TV news programs is a novel task. However, the majority of existing displaying systems working on Chinese sign language synthesis concentrate on mapping system which automatically converts Chinese text to some sign that the deaf can understand well and it doesn’t implement such displaying system. In this paper, an improved context-sensitive algorithm of gesture animation is presented. It can effectively utilize the differentiae of the consecutive key frames and make the avatars’ gesture motion more natural and smooth than traditional algorithms. The authors propose a motion retargeting algorithm based on statistics and regulations for avatars’ gesture animation. It uses regulations based on statistics, and considers the differentiae of skeleton in size and the features of gesture motion between virtual models, which have the similar skeleton topology. It can improve the accuracy of gesture motion data when transferring the standard avatar’s gesture motion data to the new model without rectifying the standard model’s gesture motion data by people using specified software. Finally, by extending the forms of basic gesture words’ representation and adopting the alpha blending technique, a displaying system based on Chinese sign language synthesis technology for TV news programs has been effectively implemented.