Sign Language Recognition

This chapter covers the key aspects of sign-language recognition (SLR), starting with a brief introduction to the motivations and requirements, followed by a précis of sign linguistics and their impact on the field. The types of data available and the relative merits are explored allowing examination of the features which can be extracted. Classifying the manual aspects of sign (similar to gestures) is then discussed from a tracking and non-tracking viewpoint before summarising some of the approaches to the non-manual aspects of sign languages. Methods for combining the sign classification results into full SLR are given showing the progression towards speech recognition techniques and the further adaptations required for the sign specific case. Finally the current frontiers are discussed and the recent research presented. This covers the task of continuous sign recognition, the work towards true signer independence, how to effectively combine the different modalities of sign, making use of the current linguistic research and adapting to larger more noisy data set

Segment and combine approach for non-parametric time-series classification

peer reviewedThis paper presents a novel, generic, scalable, autonomous, and flexible supervised learning algorithm for the classification of multivariate and variable length time series. The essential ingredients of the algorithm are randomization, segmentation of time-series, decision tree ensemble based learning of subseries classifiers, combination of subseries classification by voting, and cross-validation based temporal resolution adaptation. Experiments are carried out with this method on 10 synthetic and real-world datasets. They highlight the good behavior of the algorithm on a large diversity of problems. Our results are also highly competitive with existing approaches from the literature