Interval Fuzzy Rule-Based Hand Gesture Recognition

This paper introduces an interval fuzzy rule-based method for the recognition of hand gestures acquired from a data glove, with an application to the recognition of hand gestures of the Brazilian Sign Language. To deal with the uncertainties in the data provided by the data glove, an approach based on interval fuzzy logic is used. The method uses the set of angles of finger joints and of separation between finger for the classification of hand configurations, and classifications of segments of hand gestures for recognizing gestures. The segmentation of gestures is based on the concept of monotonic gesture segment, sequences of hand configurations in which the variations of the angles of the finger joints have the same sign (non-increasing or non-decreasing), separated by reference configurations that mark the inflexion points in the sequence. Each gesture is characterized by its list of monotonic segments. The set of all lists of segments of a given set of gestures determines a set of finite automata able to recognize such gestures.