Development of an American Sign Language Recognition System using Canny Edge and Histogram of Oriented Gradient

Sign language is used by people who have hearing and speaking difficulties, but not understood by many without these difficulties. Therefore, sign language recognition systems are developed to aid communication between hearing impaired people and others. This paper developed a static American Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) system using canny-edge and histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) for feature extraction with K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN) as classifier. The sign language image datasets used consist of English alphabets from both Massey University and Kaggle, and numbers (0-9) from Massey University. Median filter was used to remove noise after images were converted to grayscale. Otsu algorithm was used for segmentation while edges in the images were preserved using canny edge detection technique with HOG parameters tuning to obtain feature vectors. The extracted features were used by K-NN for classification. An average recognition accuracy and computational testing time of 97.6% and 0.39s respectively were obtained based on experiments with the Massey University dataset. Similarly, an average recognition accuracy and computational testing time of 99.0% and 0.43s respectively were obtained based on experiments with the Kaggle dataset. The developed system successfully recognized static English alphabets and numbers and outperformed some existing systems.