cbir approach to the recognition of a sign language alphabet
The task of recognizing letters from the sign language alphabet, by means of which the hearing impaired people finger-spell words and proper nouns, is interpreted as a CBIR (Content Based Image Retrieval) problem. An arbitrary input image of given sign (palm gesture) is treated as a sample for search within a database (DB), which contains a large enough set of images (i.e. projections from a sufficient number of view points) for each letter of the sign language alphabet. We assume that the gestures for recognition are static images, which have been appropriately extracted from the input video sequence. In addition, we have at our disposal a CBIR method for image DB access that is simultaneously fast enough and noise-tolerant. The paper describes both the methodology used for building up the DB of image samples and the experimental study for the noise-tolerance of the available CBIR method. The latter is used to acknowledge the applicability of the proposed approach.
cbir finger-spelling image/video analysis image databases sign language recognition