Real-time American Sign Language recognition from video using hidden Markov models

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been used prominently and successfully in speech recognition and, more recently, in handwriting recognition. Consequently, they seem ideal for visual recognition of complex, structured hand gestures such as are found in sign language. We describe a real-time HMM-based system for recognizing sentence level American Sign Language (ASL) which attains a word accuracy of 99.2% without explicitly modeling the fingers.