American Sign Language Recognition system by using surface EMG signal

Abstract

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system is a novel method that allows hard of hearing people to communicate with society. In this study, an American Sign Language (ASL) recognition system was proposed by using the surface Electromyography (sEMG). The objective of this study is to recognize the American Sign Language alphabet letters and allow users to spell words and sentences. For this purpose, sEMG signals are acquired from subject's right forearm for 27 American Sign Language gestures, 26 English alphabet letters, and one for home position. Time domain, frequency domain (band power), power spectral density (band power), and average power features were used as the feature extraction methods. After feature extraction, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to obtain uncorrelated features. As a classification method, Support Vector Machine and Ensemble Learning algorithm were used and their performances were compared with tabulated results. In conclusion, the results of this study show that sEMG signal can be used for SLR systems.