Sign language recognition using Microsoft Kinect

In last decade lot of efforts had been made by research community to create sign language recognition system which provide a medium of communication for differently-abled people and their machine translations help others having trouble in understanding such sign languages. Computer vision and machine learning can be collectively applied to create such systems. In this paper, we present a sign language recognition system which makes use of depth images that were captured using a Microsoft Kinect® camera. Using computer vision algorithms, we develop a characteristic depth and motion profile for each sign language gesture. The feature matrix thus generated was trained using a multi-class SVM classifier and the final results were compared with existing techniques. The dataset used is of sign language gestures for the digits 0-9.