Abstract
Face-to-face communication remains the most powerful human interaction. Electronic devices can never fully replace the intimacy and immediacy of people conversing in the same room, or at least via a videophone. There are many subtle cues provided by facial expressions and vocal intonation that let us know how what we are saying is affecting the other person. Transmission of these nonverbal cues is very important when translating conversations from a source language into a target language. This chapter describes VideoTRAN, a conceptual framework for translating audiovisual face-to-face conversations. A simple method for audiovisual alignment in the target language is proposed and the process of audiovisual speech synthesis is described. The VideoTRAN framework has been tested in a translating videophone. An H.323 software client translating videophone allows for the transmission and translation of a set of multimodal verbal and nonverbal clues in a multilingual face-to-face communication setting.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Roebuck, C.: Effective Communication. American Management Association (1999)
Begley, A.K.: Face to Face Communication: Making Human Connections in a Technology-Driven World. Thomson Learning, Boston, MA (2004)
Spens, K.-E., Agelfors, E., Beskow, J., Granström, B., Karlsson, I., Salvi, G.: SYNFACE: a Talking Head Telephone for the Hearing Impaired. In: Proceedings of the IFHOH 7th World Congress. Helsinki, Finland (2004)
Agelfors, E., Beskow, J., Karlsson, I., Kewley, J., Salvi, G., Thomas, N.: User Evaluation of the SYNFACE Talking Head Telephone. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A.I. (eds.) ICCHP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4061, pp. 579–586. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
VoiceTRAN project website: http://www.voiceTRAN.org
Žganec Gros, J., Gruden, S., Mihelič, F., Erjavec, T., Vintar, Š., Holozan, P., Mihelič, A., Dobrišek, S., Žibert, J., Logar, N., Korošec, T.: The VoiceTRAN Speech Translation Demonstrator. In: Proceedings of the IS-LTC 2006. Ljubljana, Slovenia, pp. 234–239 (2006)
Žganec Gros, J., Gruden, S.: The VoiceTRAN Machine Translation System. In: Interspeech 2007. Antwerpen, Belgium (submitted, 2007)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Facial Action Coding System. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA (1978)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., Hager, J.C. (eds.): Facial Action Coding System. Research Nexus. Network Research Information, Salt Lake City, UT (2002)
Krahmer, E., Ruttkay, Z., Swerts, M., Wesselink, W.: Perceptual Evaluation of Audiovisual Cues for Prominence. In: ICSLP 2002. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Denver, CO, pp. 1933–1936 (2002)
Beskow, J., Granström, B., House, D.: Visual Correlates to Prominence in Several Expressive Modes. In: Proceedings of the Interspeech 2007. Pittsburg, PA, pp. 1272–1275 (2006)
Tian, Y.L., Kanade, T., Cohn, J.F.: Facial Expression Analysis. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A.K. (eds.) Handbook of Face Recognition, Springer, NY (in press, 2007)
Pandzic, I., Forchheimer, R.: MPEG-4 Facial Animation - the Standard, Implementation and Applications. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England (2002)
Ezzat, T., Geiger, G., Poggio, T.: Trainable Videorealistic Speech Animation. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH 2002, San Antonio, TX, pp. 388–398. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Cphone project, http://sourceforge.net/projects/cphone
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gros, J.Ž. (2007). VideoTRAN: A Translation Framework for Audiovisual Face-to-Face Conversations. In: Esposito, A., Faundez-Zanuy, M., Keller, E., Marinaro, M. (eds) Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4775. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76442-7_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-76442-7_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-76441-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-76442-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)