Towards a One-Way American Sign Language Translator

Inspired by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) recent successes in speech recognition, we introduce a new task for sign language recognition research: a mobile one-way American Sign Language translator. We argue that such a device should be feasible in the next few years, may provide immediate practical benefits for the Deaf community, and leads to a sustainable program of research comparable to early speech recognition efforts. We ground our efforts in a particular scenario, that of a Deaf individual seeking an apartment and discuss the system requirements and our interface for this scenario. Finally, we describe initial recognition results of 94% accuracy on a 141 sign vocabulary signed in phrases of fours signs using a one-handed glove-based system and hidden Markov models (HMMs).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FGR
• Authors: R. Martin McGuire, Jose L. Hernandez-Rebollar, Thad Starner, Valerie L. Henderson, Helene Brashear, Danielle S. Ross
• Keywords: Biometrics, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, FGR 2004, Sign Language Recognition, Speech Recognition