Korean Manual Alphabet (KMA) Recognition System Using USB Camera

Abstract

Sign language is complex visual-spatial language most used in deaf society, and is a representative example of hand gesture with linguistic structure. Korean manual alphabet is a manual alphabet that augments the vowel and consonant of Korean sign language. This paper presents a system which recognizes the Korean manual alphabet (KMA) using a USB camera and translates into a normal Korean character. The system captures images from a camera and extracts skin color regions from an image, and finds a hand region. The system detects a hand without particular cloth in a complex background. We use 14 KMA hand shape as template images, and the system compares hand shape with template images using a correlation coefficient method.