Recently, I have been looking at sign language recognition, and more specifically the recognition of finger-spelling in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling is a form of sign language where each sign correspond to a letter of the alphabet. I have developped an application for real-time fingerspelling using a Kinect+OpenNI+NITE, based on Gabor responses of depth images. The ambiguity between letters designated by similar hand shapes is resolved by an interactive interface presenting the plausible matches in a semi-circle around the user's hand, allowing him to select the correct letter by a small movement of the hand in its direction.
This work is part of the EU--project Dicta-Sign. Acknowledgements: Richard Bowden.
[1] Pugeault, N., and Bowden, R. (2011).
Spelling It Out: Real-Time ASL Fingerspelling Recognition
In Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Consumer Depth Cameras for Computer Vision, jointly with ICCV'2011.
(pdf)