DyFAV: Dynamic Feature Selection and Voting for Real-time Recognition of Fingerspelled Alphabet using Wearables

Recent research has shown that reliable recognition of sign language words and phrases using user-friendly and non-invasive armbands is feasible and desirable. This work provides an analysis and implementation of including fingerspelling recognition (FR) in such systems, which is a much harder problem due to lack of distinctive hand movements. A novel algorithm called DyFAV (Dynamic Feature Selection and Voting) is proposed for this purpose that exploits the fact that fingerspelling has a finite corpus (26 letters for ASL). The system uses an independent multiple agent voting approach to identify letters with high accuracy. The independent voting of the agents ensures that the algorithm is highly parallelizable and thus recognition times can be kept low to suit real-time mobile applications. The results are demonstrated on the entire ASL alphabet corpus for nine people with limited training and average recognition accuracy of 95.36% is achieved which is better than the state-of-art for armband sensors. The mobile, non-invasive, and real time nature of the technology is demonstrated by evaluating performance on various types of Android phones and remote server configurations.