Transformation Invariant Real-time Recognition of Indian Sign Language using Feature Fusion

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is immerging as current area of research in the field of machine learning. SLR system recognizes gestures of sign language and converts them into text/voice thus making the communication possible between deaf and ordinary people. Acceptable performance of such system demands invariance of the output with respect to certain transformations of the input. In this paper, we introduce the real time hand gesture recognition system for Indian Sign Language (ISL). In order to obtain very high recognition accuracy, we propose a hybrid feature vector by combining shape oriented features like Fourier Descriptors and region oriented features like Hu Moments & Zernike Moments. Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained using feature vectors of images of training dataset. During experiment it is found that the proposed hybrid feature vector enhanced the performance of the system by compactly representing the fundamentals of invariance with respect transformation like scaling, translation and rotation. Being invariant with respect to transformation, system is easy to use and achieved a recognition rate of 95.79%.