A comparison between Etymon- and word-based Chinese Sign Language recognition systems

Hitherto, one major challenge to sign language recognition is how to develop approaches that scale well with increasing vocabulary size. In large vocabulary speech recognition realm, it is effective to use phonemes instead of words as the basic units. This idea can be used in large vocabulary Sign Language recognition, too. In this paper, Etyma are defined to be the smallest unit in a sign language, that is, a unit that has some meaning and distinguishes one sign from the others. They can be seen as phonemes in Sign Language. Two approaches to large vocabulary Chinese Sign Language recognition are discussed in this paper. One uses etyma and the other uses whole signs as the basic units. Two CyberGloves and a Pohelmus 3-D tracker with three receivers positioned on the wrist of CyberGlove and the back are used as input device. Etymon- and word- based recognition systems are introduced, which are designed to recognize 2439 etyma and 5100 signs. And then the experimental results of these two systems are given and analyzed.