Continuous sign language recognition from wearable IMUs using deep capsule networks and game theory

Sign Language is used by the deaf community all over world. The work presented here proposes a novel one-dimensional deep capsule network (CapsNet) architecture for continuous Indian Sign Language recognition by means of signals obtained from a custom designed wearable IMU system. The performance of the proposed CapsNet architecture is assessed by altering dynamic routing between capsule layers. The proposed CapsNet yields improved accuracy values of 94% for 3 routings and 92.50% for 5 routings in comparison with the convolutional neural network (CNN) that yields an accuracy of 87.99%. Improved learning of the proposed architecture is also validated by spatial activations depicting excited units at the predictive layer. Finally, a novel non-cooperative pick-and-predict competition is designed between CapsNet and CNN. Higher value of Nash equilibrium for CapsNet as compared to CNN indicates the suitability of the proposed approach.