A wearable computer based American sign language recognizer

Modern wearable computer designs package work-station level performance in systems small enough to be worn as clothing. These machines enable technology to be brought where it is needed the most for the handicapped: everyday mobile environments. This paper describes a research effort to make a wearable computer that can recognize (with the possible goal of translating) sentence level American Sign Language (ASL) using only a baseball cap mounted camera for input. Current accuracy exceeds 97% per word on a 40 word lexicon.