Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

66 results found in machine learning.

Neural Network (Artificial Neural Network, ANN)
A machine learning model inspired by the structure of biological neural networks in the brain, consisting of interconnected layers of nodes (neurons) that process information by adjusting weighted con…
Optical Flow
A computer vision method that estimates the apparent motion of objects between consecutive video frames by tracking pixel displacement patterns. Optical flow calculates velocity vectors showing moveme…
POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process)
A Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for modelling decision-making in situations where an agent cannot fully observe the state of its environment. In acce…
Particle Filtering (Sequential Monte Carlo, Particle Filter)
Particle filtering is a probabilistic localization technique that estimates a user's position by maintaining a cloud of weighted "particles," each representing a possible location. As new sensor data …
Pattern Recognition
A branch of machine learning and artificial intelligence focused on identifying regularities, patterns, and structures in data such as images, sounds, or sensor readings. In accessibility, pattern rec…
Polar Motion Profile (PMP)
A Polar Motion Profile (PMP) is a computational technique used in sign language detection that models the quantity and distribution of motion relative to a detected face using polar coordinates. The m…
Privacy-Enhancing Data Filters (Privacy Filters, Data Obfuscation Filters)
Visual or data modifications applied to training datasets that obscure the identity of contributors while preserving the information needed for machine learning tasks. In the context of sign language …
Project Sidewalk
An open-source web-based crowdsourcing tool developed at the University of Washington that enables volunteers to virtually audit sidewalk accessibility using Google Street View panoramas. Contributors…
Random Forest Classifier (Random Forest)
A machine learning algorithm that creates multiple decision trees during training and outputs the class that is the mode of the individual trees predictions. Random forests are widely used in gesture …
SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique)
A data augmentation technique that addresses class imbalance in machine learning datasets by generating synthetic examples of the minority class rather than simply duplicating existing ones. SMOTE cre…
Scene Classification (Scene Recognition, Scene Understanding)
Scene classification is a computer vision task that categorizes images or video frames into predefined scene types such as indoor/outdoor, kitchen, office, or street. For accessibility, scene classifi…
Sign language translation (SLT, Sign-to-text translation)
The automatic conversion of sign language video into written or spoken language text using machine learning. Unlike sign language recognition, which identifies individual signs or glosses, sign langua…
Signer-Independent Recognition (signer-independent SLR)
A sign language recognition approach designed to work with signers whose data was not included in the training set. Similar to speaker-independent speech recognition, signer-independent systems must h…
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)
A mathematical technique that decomposes a matrix into three component matrices, used to reduce high-dimensional data to its most important features while preserving essential relationships. In access…
Sound Recognition (Sound Classification, Audio Event Detection, Environmental Sound Recognition)
Technology that automatically identifies and classifies sounds in a user's environment, typically using machine learning models trained on audio datasets. In accessibility contexts, sound recognition …
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER, Vocal Emotion Recognition)
A class of machine-learning techniques that infers a speaker's emotional state from acoustic features of speech — pitch contour, intensity, rhythm, spectral properties, voice quality — usually produci…
Support Vector Machine (SVM)
A supervised machine learning algorithm used for classification and regression tasks. SVMs work by finding the optimal hyperplane that separates data points into distinct categories in a high-dimensio…
Teachable AI (Teachable Machine Learning, Interactive Machine Learning)
Teachable AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that allow end users to personalize the system by providing their own training examples, high-level constraints, or prompts — without requiring p…
Teachable Object Recognizer (Teachable Machine, Personalized Object Recognizer)
A machine learning application that allows end users to train custom object recognition models by providing their own example images, rather than relying on pre-trained models with fixed categories. I…
Topic Modeling (LDA, Latent Dirichlet Allocation)
A machine learning technique that automatically discovers abstract themes or topics within a collection of documents by analyzing patterns of word co-occurrence. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is t…