More Like this

1. Dynamic Cross-Feature Fusion for American Sign Language Translation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FG52635.2021.9667027  

   Ananthanarayana, Tejaswini ; Kotecha, Nikunj ; Srivastava, Priyanshu ; Chaudhary, Lipisha ; Wilkins, Nicholas ; Nwogu, Ifeoma ( December 2021 , 2021 16th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2021))

   While a significant amount of work has been done on the commonly used, tightly -constrained weather-based, German sign language (GSL) dataset, little has been done for continuous sign language translation (SLT) in more realistic settings, including American sign language (ASL) translation. Also, while CNN - based features have been consistently shown to work well on the GSL dataset, it is not clear whether such features will work as well in more realistic settings when there are more heterogeneous signers in non-uniform backgrounds. To this end, in this work, we introduce a new, realistic phrase-level ASL dataset (ASLing), and explore the role of different types of visual features (CNN embeddings, human body keypoints, and optical flow vectors) in translating it to spoken American English. We propose a novel Transformer-based, visual feature learning method for ASL translation. We demonstrate the explainability efficacy of our proposed learning methods by visualizing activation weights under various input conditions and discover that the body keypoints are consistently the most reliable set of input features. Using our model, we successfully transfer-learn from the larger GSL dataset to ASLing, resulting in significant BLEU score improvements. In summary, this work goes a long way in bringing together the AI resources required for automated ASL translation in unconstrained environments. 

   more » « less
2. Deep Learning Methods for Sign Language Translation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3477498  

   Ananthanarayana, Tejaswini ; Srivastava, Priyanshu ; Chintha, Akash ; Santha, Akhil ; Landy, Brian ; Panaro, Joseph ; Webster, Andre ; Kotecha, Nikunj ; Sah, Shagan ; Sarchet, Thomastine ; et al ( December 2021 , ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing)

   Many sign languages are bona fide natural languages with grammatical rules and lexicons hence can benefit from machine translation methods. Similarly, since sign language is a visual-spatial language, it can also benefit from computer vision methods for encoding it. With the advent of deep learning methods in recent years, significant advances have been made in natural language processing (specifically neural machine translation) and in computer vision methods (specifically image and video captioning). Researchers have therefore begun expanding these learning methods to sign language understanding. Sign language interpretation is especially challenging, because it involves a continuous visual-spatial modality where meaning is often derived based on context. The focus of this article, therefore, is to examine various deep learning–based methods for encoding sign language as inputs, and to analyze the efficacy of several machine translation methods, over three different sign language datasets. The goal is to determine which combinations are sufficiently robust for sign language translation without any gloss-based information. To understand the role of the different input features, we perform ablation studies over the model architectures (input features + neural translation models) for improved continuous sign language translation. These input features include body and finger joints, facial points, as well as vector representations/embeddings from convolutional neural networks. The machine translation models explored include several baseline sequence-to-sequence approaches, more complex and challenging networks using attention, reinforcement learning, and the transformer model. We implement the translation methods over multiple sign languages—German (GSL), American (ASL), and Chinese sign languages (CSL). From our analysis, the transformer model combined with input embeddings from ResNet50 or pose-based landmark features outperformed all the other sequence-to-sequence models by achieving higher BLEU2-BLEU4 scores when applied to the controlled and constrained GSL benchmark dataset. These combinations also showed significant promise on the other less controlled ASL and CSL datasets. 

   more » « less
3. SignNet: Single Channel Sign Generation using Metric Embedded Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FG57933.2023.10042711  

   Ananthanarayana, Tejaswini ; Chaudhary, Lipisha ; Nwogu, Ifeoma ( January 2023 , Proceedings of the International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition)

   A true interpreting agent not only understands sign language and translates to text, but also understands text and translates to signs. Much of the AI work in sign language translation to date has focused mainly on translating from signs to text. Towards the latter goal, we propose a text-to-sign translation model, SignNet, which exploits the notion of similarity (and dissimilarity) of visual signs in translating. This module presented is only one part of a dual-learning two task process involving text-to-sign (T2S) as well as sign-to-text (S2T). We currently implement SignNet as a single channel architecture so that the output of the T2S task can be fed into S2T in a continuous dual learning framework. By single channel, we refer to a single modality, the body pose joints. In this work, we present SignNet, a T2S task using a novel metric embedding learning process, to preserve the distances between sign embeddings relative to their dissimilarity. We also describe how to choose positive and negative examples of signs for similarity testing. From our analysis, we observe that metric embedding learning-based model perform significantly better than the other models with traditional losses, when evaluated using BLEU scores. In the task of gloss to pose, SignNet performed as well as its state-of-the-art (SoTA) counterparts and outperformed them in the task of text to pose, by showing noteworthy enhancements in BLEU 1 - BLEU 4 scores (BLEU 1: 31 → 39; ≈26% improvement and BLEU 4: 10.43 →11.84; ≈14% improvement) when tested on the popular RWTH PHOENIX-Weather-2014T benchmark dataset 

   more » « less
4. SignNet II: A Transformer-Based Two-Way Sign Language Translation Model

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2022.3232389  

   Chaudhary, Lipisha ; Ananthanarayana, Tejaswini ; Hoq, Enjamamul ; Nwogu, Ifeoma ( December 2022 , IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   The role of a sign interpreting agent is to bridge the communication gap between the hearing-only and Deaf or Hard of Hearing communities by translating both from sign language to text and from text to sign language. Until now, much of the AI work in automated sign language processing has focused primarily on sign language to text translation, which puts the advantage mainly on the side of hearing individuals. In this work, we describe advances in sign language processing based on transformer networks. Specifically, we introduce SignNet II, a sign language processing architecture, a promising step towards facilitating two-way sign language communication. It is comprised of sign-to-text and text-to-sign networks jointly trained using a dual learning mechanism. Furthermore, by exploiting the notion of sign similarity, a metric embedding learning process is introduced to enhance the text-to-sign translation performance. Using a bank of multi-feature transformers, we analyzed several input feature representations and discovered that keypoint-based pose features consistently performed well, irrespective of the quality of the input videos. We demonstrated that the two jointly trained networks outperformed their singly-trained counterparts, showing noteworthy enhancements in BLEU-1 - BLEU-4 scores when tested on the largest available German Sign Language (GSL) benchmark dataset. 

   more » « less
5. A Deep Learning-Based Real-time Seizure Detection System

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB50085.2020.9353623  

   Shawki, N. ; Elseify, T. ; Cap, T. ; Shah, V. ; Obeid, I. ; Picone, J. ( December 2020 , Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB))

   Obeid, Iyad Selesnick (Ed.)

   Electroencephalography (EEG) is a popular clinical monitoring tool used for diagnosing brain-related disorders such as epilepsy [1]. As monitoring EEGs in a critical-care setting is an expensive and tedious task, there is a great interest in developing real-time EEG monitoring tools to improve patient care quality and efficiency [2]. However, clinicians require automatic seizure detection tools that provide decisions with at least 75% sensitivity and less than 1 false alarm (FA) per 24 hours [3]. Some commercial tools recently claim to reach such performance levels, including the Olympic Brainz Monitor [4] and Persyst 14 [5]. In this abstract, we describe our efforts to transform a high-performance offline seizure detection system [3] into a low latency real-time or online seizure detection system. An overview of the system is shown in Figure 1. The main difference between an online versus offline system is that an online system should always be causal and has minimum latency which is often defined by domain experts. The offline system, shown in Figure 2, uses two phases of deep learning models with postprocessing [3]. The channel-based long short term memory (LSTM) model (Phase 1 or P1) processes linear frequency cepstral coefficients (LFCC) [6] features from each EEG channel separately. We use the hypotheses generated by the P1 model and create additional features that carry information about the detected events and their confidence. The P2 model uses these additional features and the LFCC features to learn the temporal and spatial aspects of the EEG signals using a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) and LSTM model. Finally, Phase 3 aggregates the results from both P1 and P2 before applying a final postprocessing step. The online system implements Phase 1 by taking advantage of the Linux piping mechanism, multithreading techniques, and multi-core processors. To convert Phase 1 into an online system, we divide the system into five major modules: signal preprocessor, feature extractor, event decoder, postprocessor, and visualizer. The system reads 0.1-second frames from each EEG channel and sends them to the feature extractor and the visualizer. The feature extractor generates LFCC features in real time from the streaming EEG signal. Next, the system computes seizure and background probabilities using a channel-based LSTM model and applies a postprocessor to aggregate the detected events across channels. The system then displays the EEG signal and the decisions simultaneously using a visualization module. The online system uses C++, Python, TensorFlow, and PyQtGraph in its implementation. The online system accepts streamed EEG data sampled at 250 Hz as input. The system begins processing the EEG signal by applying a TCP montage [8]. Depending on the type of the montage, the EEG signal can have either 22 or 20 channels. To enable the online operation, we send 0.1-second (25 samples) length frames from each channel of the streamed EEG signal to the feature extractor and the visualizer. Feature extraction is performed sequentially on each channel. The signal preprocessor writes the sample frames into two streams to facilitate these modules. In the first stream, the feature extractor receives the signals using stdin. In parallel, as a second stream, the visualizer shares a user-defined file with the signal preprocessor. This user-defined file holds raw signal information as a buffer for the visualizer. The signal preprocessor writes into the file while the visualizer reads from it. Reading and writing into the same file poses a challenge. The visualizer can start reading while the signal preprocessor is writing into it. To resolve this issue, we utilize a file locking mechanism in the signal preprocessor and visualizer. Each of the processes temporarily locks the file, performs its operation, releases the lock, and tries to obtain the lock after a waiting period. The file locking mechanism ensures that only one process can access the file by prohibiting other processes from reading or writing while one process is modifying the file [9]. The feature extractor uses circular buffers to save 0.3 seconds or 75 samples from each channel for extracting 0.2-second or 50-sample long center-aligned windows. The module generates 8 absolute LFCC features where the zeroth cepstral coefficient is replaced by a temporal domain energy term. For extracting the rest of the features, three pipelines are used. The differential energy feature is calculated in a 0.9-second absolute feature window with a frame size of 0.1 seconds. The difference between the maximum and minimum temporal energy terms is calculated in this range. Then, the first derivative or the delta features are calculated using another 0.9-second window. Finally, the second derivative or delta-delta features are calculated using a 0.3-second window [6]. The differential energy for the delta-delta features is not included. In total, we extract 26 features from the raw sample windows which add 1.1 seconds of delay to the system. We used the Temple University Hospital Seizure Database (TUSZ) v1.2.1 for developing the online system [10]. The statistics for this dataset are shown in Table 1. A channel-based LSTM model was trained using the features derived from the train set using the online feature extractor module. A window-based normalization technique was applied to those features. In the offline model, we scale features by normalizing using the maximum absolute value of a channel [11] before applying a sliding window approach. Since the online system has access to a limited amount of data, we normalize based on the observed window. The model uses the feature vectors with a frame size of 1 second and a window size of 7 seconds. We evaluated the model using the offline P1 postprocessor to determine the efficacy of the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique. As shown by the results of experiments 1 and 4 in Table 2, these changes give us a comparable performance to the offline model. The online event decoder module utilizes this trained model for computing probabilities for the seizure and background classes. These posteriors are then postprocessed to remove spurious detections. The online postprocessor receives and saves 8 seconds of class posteriors in a buffer for further processing. It applies multiple heuristic filters (e.g., probability threshold) to make an overall decision by combining events across the channels. These filters evaluate the average confidence, the duration of a seizure, and the channels where the seizures were observed. The postprocessor delivers the label and confidence to the visualizer. The visualizer starts to display the signal as soon as it gets access to the signal file, as shown in Figure 1 using the “Signal File” and “Visualizer” blocks. Once the visualizer receives the label and confidence for the latest epoch from the postprocessor, it overlays the decision and color codes that epoch. The visualizer uses red for seizure with the label SEIZ and green for the background class with the label BCKG. Once the streaming finishes, the system saves three files: a signal file in which the sample frames are saved in the order they were streamed, a time segmented event (TSE) file with the overall decisions and confidences, and a hypotheses (HYP) file that saves the label and confidence for each epoch. The user can plot the signal and decisions using the signal and HYP files with only the visualizer by enabling appropriate options. For comparing the performance of different stages of development, we used the test set of TUSZ v1.2.1 database. It contains 1015 EEG records of varying duration. The any-overlap performance [12] of the overall system shown in Figure 2 is 40.29% sensitivity with 5.77 FAs per 24 hours. For comparison, the previous state-of-the-art model developed on this database performed at 30.71% sensitivity with 6.77 FAs per 24 hours [3]. The individual performances of the deep learning phases are as follows: Phase 1’s (P1) performance is 39.46% sensitivity and 11.62 FAs per 24 hours, and Phase 2 detects seizures with 41.16% sensitivity and 11.69 FAs per 24 hours. We trained an LSTM model with the delayed features and the window-based normalization technique for developing the online system. Using the offline decoder and postprocessor, the model performed at 36.23% sensitivity with 9.52 FAs per 24 hours. The trained model was then evaluated with the online modules. The current performance of the overall online system is 45.80% sensitivity with 28.14 FAs per 24 hours. Table 2 summarizes the performances of these systems. The performance of the online system deviates from the offline P1 model because the online postprocessor fails to combine the events as the seizure probability fluctuates during an event. The modules in the online system add a total of 11.1 seconds of delay for processing each second of the data, as shown in Figure 3. In practice, we also count the time for loading the model and starting the visualizer block. When we consider these facts, the system consumes 15 seconds to display the first hypothesis. The system detects seizure onsets with an average latency of 15 seconds. Implementing an automatic seizure detection model in real time is not trivial. We used a variety of techniques such as the file locking mechanism, multithreading, circular buffers, real-time event decoding, and signal-decision plotting to realize the system. A video demonstrating the system is available at: https://www.isip.piconepress.com/projects/nsf_pfi_tt/resources/videos/realtime_eeg_analysis/v2.5.1/video_2.5.1.mp4. The final conference submission will include a more detailed analysis of the online performance of each module. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research reported in this publication was most recently supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation award number IIP-1827565 and the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement Program (PA CURE). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any of these organizations. REFERENCES [1] A. Craik, Y. He, and J. L. Contreras-Vidal, “Deep learning for electroencephalogram (EEG) classification tasks: a review,” J. Neural Eng., vol. 16, no. 3, p. 031001, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/ab0ab5. [2] A. C. Bridi, T. Q. Louro, and R. C. L. Da Silva, “Clinical Alarms in intensive care: implications of alarm fatigue for the safety of patients,” Rev. Lat. Am. Enfermagem, vol. 22, no. 6, p. 1034, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-1169.3488.2513. [3] M. Golmohammadi, V. Shah, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Deep Learning Approaches for Automatic Seizure Detection from Scalp Electroencephalograms,” in Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology: Emerging Trends in Research and Applications, 1st ed., I. Obeid, I. Selesnick, and J. Picone, Eds. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2020, pp. 233–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36844-9_8. [4] “CFM Olympic Brainz Monitor.” [Online]. Available: https://newborncare.natus.com/products-services/newborn-care-products/newborn-brain-injury/cfm-olympic-brainz-monitor. [Accessed: 17-Jul-2020]. [5] M. L. Scheuer, S. B. Wilson, A. Antony, G. Ghearing, A. Urban, and A. I. Bagic, “Seizure Detection: Interreader Agreement and Detection Algorithm Assessments Using a Large Dataset,” J. Clin. Neurophysiol., 2020. https://doi.org/10.1097/WNP.0000000000000709. [6] A. Harati, M. Golmohammadi, S. Lopez, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved EEG Event Classification Using Differential Energy,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium, 2015, pp. 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/SPMB.2015.7405421. [7] V. Shah, C. Campbell, I. Obeid, and J. Picone, “Improved Spatio-Temporal Modeling in Automated Seizure Detection using Channel-Dependent Posteriors,” Neurocomputing, 2021. [8] W. Tatum, A. Husain, S. Benbadis, and P. Kaplan, Handbook of EEG Interpretation. New York City, New York, USA: Demos Medical Publishing, 2007. [9] D. P. Bovet and C. Marco, Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd ed. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2005. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-the-linux/0596005652/. [10] V. Shah et al., “The Temple University Hospital Seizure Detection Corpus,” Front. Neuroinform., vol. 12, pp. 1–6, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fninf.2018.00083. [11] F. Pedregosa et al., “Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python,” J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 12, pp. 2825–2830, 2011. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1953048.2078195. [12] J. Gotman, D. Flanagan, J. Zhang, and B. Rosenblatt, “Automatic seizure detection in the newborn: Methods and initial evaluation,” Electroencephalogr. Clin. Neurophysiol., vol. 103, no. 3, pp. 356–362, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0013-4694(97)00003-9. 

   more » « less