Gesture Recognition for Indonesian Sign Language Systems (ISLS) Using Multimodal Sensor Leap Motion and Myo Armband Controllers Based-on Naïve Bayes Classifier

Abstract

Indonesian Sign Language System (ISLS) has been used widely by Indonesian for translating the sign language of disabled people to many applications, including education or entertainment. ISLS consists of static and dynamic gestures in representing words or sentences. However, individual variations in performing sign language have been a big challenge especially for developing automatic translation. The accuracy of recognizing the signs will decrease linearly with the increase of variations of gestures. This research is targeted to solve these issues by implementing the multimodal methods: leap motion and Myo armband controllers (EMG electrodes). By combining these two data and implementing Naive Bayes classifier, we hypothesized that the accuracy of gesture recognition system for ISLS then can be increased significantly. The data streams captured from hand-poses were based on time-domain series method which will warrant the generated data synchronized accurately. The selected features for leap motion data would be based on fingers positions, angles, and elevations, while for the Myo armband would be based on electrical signal generated by eight channels of EMG electrodes relevant to the activities of linked finger’s and forearm muscles. This study will investigate the accuracy of gesture recognition by using either single modal or multimodal for translating Indonesian sign language. For multimodal strategy, both features datasets were merged into a single dataset which was then used for generating a model for each hand gesture. The result showed that there was a significant improvement on its accuracy, from 91% for single modal using leap motion to 98% for multi-modal (combined with Myo armband). The confusion matrix of multimodal method also showed better performance than the single-modality. Finally, we concluded that the implementation of multi-modal controllers for ISLS’s gesture recognition showed better accuracy and performance compared of single modality of using only leap motion controller.