The Sign’Maths project aims at giving access to pedagogical resources in Sign Language (SL). It will provide Deaf students and teachers with mathematics vocabulary in SL, this in order to contribute to the standardisation of the vocabulary used at school. The work conducted led to Sign’Maths, an online interactive tool that gives Deaf students access to mathematics definitions in SL. A group of mathematics teachers for Deafs and teachers experts in SL collaborated to create signs to express mathematics concepts, and to produce videos of definitions, examples and illustrations for these concepts. In parallel, we are working on the conception and the design of Sign’Maths software and user interface. Our research work investigated ways to include SL in pedagogical resources in order to present information but also to navigate through the content. User tests revealed that users appreciate the use of SL in a pedagogical resource. However, they pointed out that SL content should be complemented with French to support bilingual education. Our final solution takes advantage of the complementarity of SL, French and visual content to provide an interface that will suit users no matter what their education background is. Future work will investigate a tool for text and signs’ search within Sign’Maths.

Nowadays many researches focus on the automatic recognition of sign language. High recognition rates are achieved using lot of training data. This data is, generally, collected by manual annotating SL video corpus. However this is time consuming and the results depend on the annotators knowledge. In this work we intend to assist the annotation in terms of glosses which consist on writing down the sign meaning sign for sign thanks to automatic video processing techniques. In this case using learning data is not suitable since at the first step it will be needed to manually annotate the corpus. Also the context dependency of signs and the co-articulation effect in continuous SL make the collection of learning data very difficult. Here we present a novel approach which uses lexical representations of sign to overcome these problems and image processing techniques to match sign performances to sign representations. Signs are described using Zeebede (ZBD) which is a descriptor of signs that considers the high variability of signs. A ZBD database is used to stock signs and can be queried using several characteristics. From a video corpus sequence features are extracted using a robust body part tracking approach and a semi-automatic sign segmentation algorithm. Evaluation has shown the performances and limitation of the proposed approach.