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American Sign Language alphabet recognition using Microsoft Kinect

  • Missouri University of Science and Technology

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

232 Scopus citations

Abstract

American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet recognition using marker-less vision sensors is a challenging task due to the complexity of ASL alphabet signs, self-occlusion of the hand, and limited resolution of the sensors. This paper describes a new method for ASL alphabet recognition using a low-cost depth camera, which is Microsoft's Kinect. A segmented hand configuration is first obtained by using a depth contrast feature based per-pixel classification algorithm. Then, a hierarchical mode-seeking method is developed and implemented to localize hand joint positions under kinematic constraints. Finally, a Random Forest (RF) classifier is built to recognize ASL signs using the joint angles. To validate the performance of this method, we used a publicly available dataset from Surrey University. The results have shown that our method can achieve above 90% accuracy in recognizing 24 static ASL alphabet signs, which is significantly higher in comparison to the previous benchmarks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, CVPRW 2015
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages44-52
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781467367592
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 19 2015
EventIEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, CVPRW 2015 - Boston, United States
Duration: Jun 7 2015Jun 12 2015

Publication series

NameIEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops
Volume2015-October
ISSN (Print)2160-7508
ISSN (Electronic)2160-7516

Conference

ConferenceIEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, CVPRW 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period06/7/1506/12/15

Keywords

  • Accuracy
  • Gesture recognition
  • Joints
  • Kinematics
  • Probability distribution
  • Thumb

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