Recovering the linguistic components of the manual signs in American Sign Language

Manual signs in American Sign Language (ASL) are constructed using three building blocks – handshape, motion, and place of articulations. Only when these three are successfully estimated, can a sign by uniquely identified. Hence, the use of pattern recognition techniques that use only a subset of these is inappropriate. To achieve accurate classifications, the motion, the handshape and their three-dimensional position need to be recovered. In this paper, we define an algorithm to determine these three components form a single video sequence of twodimensional pictures of a sign. We demonstrated the use of our algorithm in describing and recognizing a set of manual signs in ASL.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AVSS
• Authors: Liya Ding, Aleix M. Martínez
• Keywords: American Sign Language, AVSS 2007, Manual Signs, Pattern Recognition Techniques, Signal Processing