Stream State-tying for Sign Language Recognition

It is a kind of visual language via hand and arm movements accompanying facial expression and lip motion. The facial expression and lip motion are less important than hand gestures in sign language, but they may help to understand some hand gestures. Digitized devices can be used to measure the temporal and spatial information of hand gestures, the typical devices are data gloves, position trackers. In this paper, we use two CyberGloves and a position tracker, i.e., Pohelmus 3SPACE with two receivers positioned on the wrist of each CyberGlove and one fixed at thorax as input devices to measure gestures. Chinese sign language is classified into two categories. One is hand gesture in which each gesture corresponds to a Chinese phrase. The other is fingerspelling in which each alphabet corresponds to a posture, and each Chinese sign corresponds to several postures performed continuously.