Towards Automatic Sign Translation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Signs are everywhere in our lives. They make our lives easier when we are familiar with them. But sometimes they also pose problems. For example, a tourist might not be able to understand signs in a foreign country. In this paper, we present our efforts towards automatic sign translation. We discuss methods for automatic sign detection. We describe sign translation using example based machine translation technology. We use a usercentered approach in developing an automatic sign translation system. The approach takes advantage of human intelligence in selecting an area of interest and domain for translation if needed. A user can determine which sign is to be translated if multiple signs have been detected within the image. The selected part of the image is then processed, recognized, and translated. We have developed a prototype system that can recognize Chinese signs input from a video camera which is a common gadget for a tourist, and translate them into English text or voice stream.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADA458664

Entities

People

  • Alex Waibel
  • Jiang Gao
  • Jie Yang
  • Ying Zhang

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Automatic
  • Cameras
  • Character Recognition
  • Computational Science
  • Detection
  • Dictionaries
  • Human Intelligence
  • Language
  • Language Translation
  • Machine Translation
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Prototypes
  • Recognition
  • Translations
  • Video
  • Video Cameras

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Vision.
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.
  • Toxicology/Environmental Toxicology

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation