This hand-tracking algorithm could lead to sign language recognition – TechCrunch

Millions of people communicate using sign language, but so far projects to capture its complex gestures and translate them to verbal speech have had limited success. A new advance in real-time hand tracking from Google's AI labs, however, could be the breakthrough some have been waiting for. The new technique uses a few clever shortcuts and, of course, the increasing general efficiency of machine learning systems to produce, in real time, a highly accurate map of the hand and all its fingers, using nothing but a smartphone and its camera. "Whereas current state-of-the-art approaches rely primarily on powerful desktop environments for inference, our method achieves real-time performance on a mobile phone, and even scales to multiple hands," write Google researchers Valentin Bazarevsky and Fan Zhang in a blog post. "Robust real-time hand perception is a decidedly challenging computer vision task, as hands often occlude themselves or each other (e.g.