Abstract
Arabic Sign Language recognition is an emerging field of research. Previous attempts at automatic visionbased recognition of Arabic Sign Language mainly focused on finger spelling and recognizing isolated gestures. In this paper we report the first continuous Arabic Sign Language by building on existing research in feature extraction and pattern recognition. The development of the presented work required collecting a continuous Arabic Sign Language database which we designed and recorded in cooperation with a sign language expert. We intend to make the collected database available for the research community. Our system which we based on spatio-temporal feature extraction and hidden Markov models has resulted in an average word recognition rate of 94%, keeping in the mind the use of a high perplexity vocabulary and unrestrictive grammar. We compare our proposed work against existing sign language techniques based on accumulated image difference and motion estimation. The experimental results section shows that the proposed work outperforms existing solutions in terms of recognition accuracy.
