American sign language (ASL) recognition based on Hough transform and neural networks

The work presented in this paper aims to develop a system for automatic translation of static gestures of alphabets and signs in American sign language. In doing so, we have used Hough transform and neural networks which is trained to recognize signs. Our system does not rely on using any gloves or visual markings to achieve the recognition task. Instead, it deals with images of bare hands, which allows the user to interact with the system in a natural way. An image is processed and converted to a feature vector that will be compared with the feature vectors of a training set of signs. The extracted features are not affected by the rotation, scaling or translation of the gesture within the image, which makes the system more flexible. The system was implemented and tested using a data set of 300 samples of hand sign images; 15 images for each sign. Experiments revealed that our system was able to recognize selected ASL signs with an accuracy of 92.3%. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.