Improving Recognition of SIBI Gesture by Combining Skeleton and Hand Shape Features

SIBI (Sign System for Indonesian Language) is an official sign language system used in school for hearing impairment students in Indonesia. This work uses the skeleton and hand shape features to classify SIBI gestures. In order to improve the performance of the gesture classification system, we tried to fuse the features in several different ways. The accuracy results achieved by the feature fusion methods are, in descending order of accuracy: 88.016%, when using sequence-feature-vector concatenation, 85.448% when using Conneau feature vector concatenation, 83.723% when using feature-vector concatenation, and 49.618% when using simple feature concatenation. The sequence-feature-vector concatenation techniques yield noticeably better results than those achieved using single features (82.849% with skeleton feature only, 55.530% for the hand shape feature only). The experiment results show that the combined features of the whole gesture sequence can better distinguish one gesture from another in SIBI than the combined features of each gesture frame. In addition to finding the best feature combination technique, this study also found the most suitable Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model for recognizing SIBI. The models tested are 1-layer, 2-layer LSTM, and GRU. The experimental results show that the 2-layer bidirectional LSTM has the best performance