A Signature Based Dravidian Sign Language Recognition By Sparse Representation

Abstract

Sign language is a visual-gestural language used by deaf-dumb people for communication. As normal people are unfamiliar of sign language, the hearing-impaired people find it difficult to communicate with them. The communication gap between the normal and the deaf-dumb people can be bridged by means of Human–Computer Interaction. The objective of this paper is to convert the Dravidian (Tamil) sign language into text. The proposed method recognizes 12 vowels, 18 consonants and a special character “Aytham” of Tamil language by a vision based approach. In this work, the static images of the hand signs are obtained a web/digital camera. The hand region is segmented by a threshold applied to the hue channel of the input image. Then the region of interest (i.e. from wrist to fingers) is segmented using the reversed horizontal projection profile and the Discrete Cosine transformed signature is extracted from the boundary of hand sign. These features are invariant to translation, scale and rotation. Sparse representation classifier is incorporated to recognize 31 hand signs. The proposed method has attained a maximum recognition accuracy of 71% in a uniform background.