Hand shape estimation for South African sign language
Pei Li · University of the Western Cape Electronic Theses and Dissertations Repository (University of the Western Cape) · 2012
Hand shape recognition is a pivotal part of any system that attempts to implement Sign Language recognition.This thesis presents a novel system which recognises hand shapes from a single camera view in 2D.By mapping the recognised hand shape from 2D to 3D, it is possible to obtain 3D co-ordinates for each of the joints within the hand using the kinematics embedded in a 3D hand avatar and smooth the transformation in 3D space between any given hand shapes.The novelty in this system is that it does not require a hand pose to be recognised at every frame, but rather that hand shapes be detected at a given step size.This architecture allows for a more efficient system with better accuracy than other related systems.Moreover, a real-time hand tracking strategy was developed that works efficiently for any skin tone and a complex background.