MAN-MACHINE INTERACTION SYSTEM FOR SUBJECT INDEPENDENT SIGN LANGUAGE RECOGNITION USING FUZZY HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL

Sign language recognition has spawned more and more interest in human–computer interaction society. The major challenge that SLR recognition faces now is developing methods that will scale well with increasing vocabulary size with a limited set of training data for the signer independent application. The automatic SLR based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) is very sensitive to gesture's shape information that makes the accurate parameters of the HMM not capable of characterizing the ambiguous distributions of the observations in gesture's features. This paper presents an extension of the HMMs using interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs) to produce interval type-2 fuzzy HMMs to model uncertainties of hypothesis spaces (unknown varieties of parameters of the decision function). The benefit of this enlargement is that it can control both the randomness and fuzziness of traditional HMM mapping. Membership function (MF) of type-2 FS is three-dimensional that provides additional degrees of freedom to evaluate HMM's uncertainties. This system aspires to be a solution to the scalability problem, i.e. has real potential for application on a large vocabulary. Furthermore, it does not rely on the use of data gloves or other means as input devices, and operates in isolated signer-independent modes. Experimental results show that the interval type-2 fuzzy HMM has a comparable performance as that of the fuzzy HMM but is more robust to the gesture variation, while it retains almost the same computational complexity as that of the FHMM.