American sign language recognition in game development for deaf children

CopyCat is an American Sign Language (ASL) game, which uses gesture recognition technology to help young deaf children practice ASL skills. We describe a brief history of the game, an overview of recent user studies, and the results of recent work on the problem of continuous, user– independent sign language recognition in classroom settings. Our database of signing samples was collected from user studies of deaf children playing a Wizard of Oz version of the game at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf (AASD). Our data set is characterized by disfluencies inherent in continuous signing, varied user characteristics including clothing and skin tones, and illumination changes in the classroom. The dataset consisted of 541 phrase samples and 1,959 individual sign samples of five children signing game phrases from a 22 word vocabulary. Our recognition approach uses color histogram adaptation for robust hand segmentation and tracking. The children wear small colored gloves with wireles...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ASSETS
• Authors: Helene Brashear, Valerie L. Henderson, Kwang-Hyun Park, Harley Hamilton, Seungyon Claire Lee, Thad Starner
• Keywords: ASSETS 2006, Deaf Children, Sign Language, Sign Language Recognition