Japanese finger-spelling recognition using a chest-mounted camera

This paper proposes a technique for recognizing Japanese finger-spelling using a sign language user´s chest-mounted camera. Unlike existent systems, the technique employs a chest-mounted camera attached to a sign language user himself/herself and recognizes his/her sign language through the captured images of Japanese finger-spelling. We use a hand area picture of his/her hand and the MHIs (Motion History Images) for the Japanese finger-spelling recognition. For the recognition method, we employ the ICA (Independent Component Analysis). Furthermore, in order to recognize the Japanese finger-spelling from an animation (an image sequence), a character segmentation technique is also proposed. The performance of the proposed system is shown experimentally.