Large vocabulary sign language recognition based on fuzzy decision trees

The major difficulty for large vocabulary sign recognition lies in the huge search space due to a variety of recognized classes. How to reduce the recognition time without loss of accuracy is a challenging issue. In this paper, a fuzzy decision tree with heterogeneous classifiers is proposed for large vocabulary sign language recognition. As each sign feature has the different discrimination to gestures, the corresponding classifiers are presented for the hierarchical decision to sign language attributes. A one- or two- handed classifier and a hand-shaped classifier with little computational cost are first used to progressively eliminate many impossible candidates, and then, a self-organizing feature maps/hidden Markov model (SOFM/HMM) classifier in which SOFM being as an implicit different signers' feature extractor for continuous HMM, is proposed as a special component of a fuzzy decision tree to get the final results at the last nonleaf nodes that only include a few candidates. Experimental results on a large vocabulary of 5113-signs show that the proposed method dramatically reduces the recognition time by 11 times and also improves the recognition rate about 0.95% over single SOFM/HMM.