Hybrid HMM for Transitional Gesture Classification in Thai Sign Language Translation

A human sign language is generally composed of both static and dynamic gestures. Each gesture is represented by a hand shape, its position, and hand movement (for a dynamic gesture). One of the problems found in automated sign language translation is on segmenting a hand movement that is part of a transitional movement from one hand gesture to another. This transitional gesture conveys no meaning, but serves as a connecting period between two consecutive gestures. Based on the observation that many dynamic gestures as appeared in Thai sign language dictionary are of quasi-periodic nature, a method was developed to differentiate between a (meaningful) dynamic gesture and a transitional movement. However, there are some meaningful dynamic gestures that are of non-periodic nature. Those gestures cannot be distinguished from a transitional movement by using the signal quasi-periodicity. This paper proposes a hybrid method using a combination of the periodicity-based gesture segmentation method with a HMM-based gesture classifier. The HMM classifier is used here to detect dynamic signs of non-periodic nature. Combined with the periodic-based gesture segmentation method, this hybrid scheme can be used to identify segments of a transitional movement. In addition, due to the use of quasi-periodic nature of many dynamic sign gestures, dimensionality of the HMM part of the proposed method is significantly reduced, resulting in computational saving as compared with a standard HMM-based method. Through experiment with real measurement, the proposed method's recognition performance is reported.