Indian sign language recognition using SVM

Abstract

Needs and new technologies always inspire people to make new ways to interact with machines. This interaction can be for a specific purpose or a framework which can be applied to many applications. Sign language recognition is a very important area where an easiness in interaction with human or machine will help a lot of people. At this time, India has 2.8M people who can't speak or can't hear properly. This paper targets Indian sign recognition area based on dynamic hand gesture recognition techniques in real-time scenario. The captured video was converted to HSV color space for pre-processing and then segmentation was done based on skin pixels. Also Depth information was used in parallel to get more accurate results. Hu-Moments and motion trajectory were extracted from the image frames and the classification of gestures was done by Support Vector Machine. The system was tested with webcam as well as with MS Kinect. This type of system would be helpful in teaching and communication of hearing impaired persons.