Recognition of Indian Sign Language using Feature Fusion

Sign Language is the most natural and expressive way for the hearing impaired. This paper presents a method for automatic recognition of two handed signs of Indian Sign Language (ISL). The method consists of three phases: Segmentation, Feature Extraction and Recognition. The segmentation is done through Otsu's algorithm. In the feature extraction phase, shape descriptors, HOG descriptors (Histogram of Oriented Gradient) and SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) feature have been fused to compute a feature vector. In the recognition phase, a multi-class Support Vector Machine (MSVM) is used for training and classifying signs of ISL. The experimental results provide evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approach with 93% recognition rate.