Recognition of Japanese sign language from image sequence using color combination

This paper proposes a method of recognising Japanese sign language indirectly using a colored glove which has multiple color patches on its surface. Japanese sign language has finger alphabets and words which include a hand motion. In the proposed method, the finger alphabets are estimated from three parameters: the color combination of the visible patches, the dispersion of the visible patches, and the hand direction. The color combination is represented by the mean of the color histogram of the visible patches in an input image. Words which include a hand motion are estimated from the transition of characteristic hand structures which are detected from an image sequence by changes in the color combination of the visible patches. The experimental results show the validity of the proposed method