Automatic recognition of sign language subwords based on portable accelerometer and EMG sensors

Sign language recognition (SLR) not only facilitates the communication between the deaf and hearing society, but also serves as a good basis for the development of gesture-based human-computer interaction (HCI). In this paper, the portable input devices based on accelerometers and surface electromyography (EMG) sensors worn on the forearm are presented, and an effective fusion strategy for combination of multi-sensor and multi-channel information is proposed to automatically recognize sign language at the subword classification level. Experimental results on the recognition of 121 frequently used Chinese sign language subwords demonstrate the feasibility of developing SLR system based on the presented portable input devices and that our proposed information fusion method is effective for automatic SLR. Our study will promote the realization of practical sign language recognizer and multimodal human-computer interfaces.