Abstract

Temporal Sign Language Recognition (TSLR) from hand motion is an active area of gesture recognition research in facilitating efficient communication with deaf people. TSLR systems consist of two stages: a motion sensing step which extracts useful features from signers' motion and a classification process which classifies these features as a performed sign. This work focuses on two of the research problems, namely unknown time varying signal of sign languages in feature extraction stage and computing complexity and time consumption in classification stage due to a very large sign sequences database. In this paper, we propose a combination of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and application of the Single hidden Layer Feedforward Neural networks (SLFNs) trained by Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) to cope the limitations. DTW has several advantages over other approaches in that it can align the length of the time series data to a same prior size, while ELM is a useful technique for classifying these warped features. Our experiment demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method with the recognition accuracy up to 98.67%. The proposed approach can be generalized to more detailed measurements so as to recognize hand gestures, body motion and facial expression.