Movement Epenthesis Detection for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Abstract

Automatic sign language recognition (SLR) is a current area of research as this is meant to serve as a substitute for sign language interpreters. In this paper, we present the design of a continuous SLR system that can extract out the meaningful signs and consequently recognize them. Here, we have used height of the hand trajectory as a salient feature for separating out the meaningful signs from the movement epenthesis patterns. Further, we have incorporated a unique set of spatial and temporal features for efficient recognition of the signs encapsulated within the continuous sequence. The implementation of an efficient hand segmentation and hand tracking technique makes our system robust to complex background as well as background with multiple signers. Experiments have established that our proposed system can identify signs from a continuous sign stream with a 92.8% spotting rate.

Keywords

• sign language recognition
• contour processing
• coarticulation
• movement epenthesis
• conditional random field