On Shape Recognition and Language

Shapes convey meaning. Language is efficient in expressing and structuring meaning. The main thesis of this chapter is that by integrating shape with linguistic information shape recognition can be improved in performance. It broadens the concept of shape to visual shapes that include both geometric and optical information and explores ways that additional linguistic information may help with shape recognition. Towards this goal, it briefly describes some shape categories which have the potential of better recognition via language, with emphasis on gestures and moving shapes of sign language, as well as on cross-modal relations between vision and language in videos. It also draws inspiration from psychological studies that explore connections between gestures and human languages. Afterwards, it focuses on the broad class of multimodal gestures that combine spatio-temporal visual shapes with audio information. In this area, an approach is reviewed that significantly improves multimodal gesture recognition by fusing 3D shape information from motion-position of gesturing hands/arms and spatio-temporal handshapes in color and depth visual channels with audio information in the form of acoustically recognized sequences of gesture words.