A real-time continuous gesture recognition system for sign language

In this paper a large vocabulary sign language interpreter is presented with real-time continuous gesture recognition of sign language using a DataGlove(TM). Sign language, which is usually known as a set of natural language with formal semantic definitions and syntactic rules, is a large set of hand gestures that are daily used to communicate with the hearing impaired. The most critical problem, end-point detection in a stream of gesture input is first solved and then statistical analysis is done according to 4 parameters in a gesture : posture, position, orientation, and motion. We have implemented a prototype system with a lexicon of 250 vocabularies and collected 196 training sentences in Taiwanese Sign Language (TI VL). This system uses hidden Markov models (HMMs) for 51 fundamental postures, 6 orientations, and 8 motion primitives. In a signer-dependent way, a sentence of gestures based on these vocabularies can be continuously recognized in real-time and the average recognition rate is 80.4%.