Vision Based Hand Gesture Recognition Using Fourier Descriptor for Indian Sign Language

Indian Sign Language (ISL) interpretation is the major research work going on to aid Indian deaf and dumb people. Considering the limitation of glove/sensor based approach, vision based approach was considered for ISL interpretation system. Among different human modalities, hand is the primarily used modality to any sign language interpretation system so, hand gesture was used for recognition of manual alphabets and numbers. ISL consists of manual alphabets, numbers as well as large set of vocabulary with grammar. In this paper, methodology for recognition of static ISL manual alphabets, number and static symbols is given. ISL alphabet consists of single handed and two handed sign. Fourier descriptor as a feature extraction method was chosen due the property of invariant to rotation, scale and translation. True positive rate was achieved 94.15% using nearest neighbourhood classifier with Euclidean distance where sample data were considered with different illumination changes, different skin color and varying distance from camera to signer position.