Towards a chereme based dynamic South African sign language gesture recognition system

Abstract

Hand gestures are a natural and intuitive way of human to human communication. Motivated by the achievements made towards automatic speech recognition, and by the ease with which people sign, many researchers started working on sign language recognition systems. Besides, technologies used to build gesture recognition systems pose as an alternative to the cumbersome and the failure prone mechanical devices that are currently used as human-machine interface devices. Most of the available gesture recognition systems represent each sign language gesture with an individual gesture model. Such systems can only recognize a limited number of dynamic sign language gestures. It is cumbersome to build and maintain a gesture recognition system that uses thousands and thousands of individual gesture models. Sign language linguists argue that all sign language gestures are derived from small sets of reusable components, the cheremes.