Real time static hand gesture recognition system prototype for Indonesian sign language

Sign language uses gestures instead of speech sound to communicate. However, it is rare that the normal people try to learn the sign language for interacting with deaf people. Therefore, the need for a translation from sign language to written or oral language becomes important. In this paper, we propose a prototype system that can recognize the hand gesture sign language in real time. We use HSV (Hue Saturation Value) color space combined with skin detection to remove the complex background and create segmented images. Then a contour detection is applied to localize and save hand area. Further, we use SURF algorithm to detect and extract key point features and recognize each hand gesture sign alphabet by comparing with these user image database. Based on the experiments, the system is capable to recognize hand gesture sign and translate to Alphabets, with recognize rate 63 % in average.