Signer-independent sign language recognition based on SOFM/HMM

The aim of sign language recognition is to provide an efficient and accurate mechanism to transcribe sign language into text or speech. State-of-the-art sign language recognition should be able to solve the signer-independent problem for practical application. In this paper, a hybrid SOFM/HMM system, which combines self-organizing feature maps (SOFMs) with hidden Markov models (HMMs), is presented for signer-independent Chinese sign language recognition. We implement the SOFM/HMM sign recognition system. Meanwhile, results from the HMM-based system are provided as comparison. Experimental results show the SOFM/HMM system increases the recognition accuracy by 5% than the HMM-based one. Furthermore, a self-adjusting recognition algorithm is also proposed for improving the SOFM/HMM discrimination. When it is applied to the SOFM/HMM system it can improve the recognition accuracy by 1.9%. All experiments were performed in real-time with the dictionary size 208.