Real-time Sign Language Fingerspelling Recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks from Depth map
This work addresses communication barriers for the deaf community by providing an efficient fingerspelling recognition system, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN methods with new data.
The paper tackles real-time sign language fingerspelling recognition by using convolutional neural networks on depth maps, achieving up to 99.99% accuracy for known signers and 83.58-85.49% for new signers with a processing time of 3 ms per image.
Sign language recognition is important for natural and convenient communication between deaf community and hearing majority. We take the highly efficient initial step of automatic fingerspelling recognition system using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from depth maps. In this work, we consider relatively larger number of classes compared with the previous literature. We train CNNs for the classification of 31 alphabets and numbers using a subset of collected depth data from multiple subjects. While using different learning configurations, such as hyper-parameter selection with and without validation, we achieve 99.99% accuracy for observed signers and 83.58% to 85.49% accuracy for new signers. The result shows that accuracy improves as we include more data from different subjects during training. The processing time is 3 ms for the prediction of a single image. To the best of our knowledge, the system achieves the highest accuracy and speed. The trained model and dataset is available on our repository.