American Sign Language word recognition with a sensory glove using artificial neural networks

An American Sign Language (ASL) recognition system is being developed using artificial neural networks (ANNs) to translate ASL words into English. The system uses a sensory glove called the Cyberglove™ and a Flock of Birds® 3-D motion tracker to extract the gesture features. The data regarding finger joint angles obtained from strain gauges in the sensory glove define the hand shape, while the data from the tracker describe the trajectory of hand movements. The data from these devices are processed by a velocity network with noise reduction and feature extraction and by a word recognition network. Some global and local features are extracted for each ASL word. A neural network is used as a classifier of this feature vector. Our goal is to continuously recognize ASL signs using these devices in real time. We trained and tested the ANN model for 50 ASL words with a different number of samples for every word. The test results show that our feature vector extraction method and neural networks can be used successfully for isolated word recognition. This system is flexible and open for future extension.