Skip to main content

Event-Based American Sign Language Recognition Using Dynamic Vision Sensor

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12939))

  • 1719 Accesses

Abstract

American Sign language (ASL) is one of the most effective communication tools for people with hearing difficulties. However, most of people do not understand ASL. To bridge this gap, we propose EV-ASL, an automatic ASL interpretation system based on dynamic vision sensor (DVS). Compared to the traditional RGB-based approach, DVS consumes significantly less resources (energy, computation, bandwidth) and it outputs the moving objects only without the need of background subtraction due to its event-based nature. At last, because of its wide dynamic response range, it enables the EV-ASL to work under a variety of lighting conditions. EV-ASL proposes novel representation of event streams and facilitates deep convolutional neural network for sign recognition. In order to evaluate the performance of EV-ASL, we recruited 10 participants and collected 11,200 samples from 56 different ASL words. The evaluation shows that EV-ASL achieves a recognition accuracy of 93.25%.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Alonso, I., Murillo, A.C.: EV-SegNet: semantic segmentation for event-based cameras. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.12039 (2018)

  2. Amir, A., et al.: A low power, fully event-based gesture recognition system. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 7243–7252 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bi, Y., Chadha, A., Abbas, A., Bourtsoulatze, E., Andreopoulos, Y.: Graph-based object classification for neuromorphic vision sensing (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bi, Y., Chadha, A., Abbas, A., Bourtsoulatze, E., Andreopoulos, Y.: Graph-based spatio-temporal feature learning for neuromorphic vision sensing. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 29, 9084–9098 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Camgöz, N.C., Hadfield, S., Koller, O., Bowden, R.: SubUNets: end-to-end hand shape and continuous sign language recognition. In: ICCV, vol. 1 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Huang, J., Zhou, W., Zhang, Q., Li, H., Li, W.: Video-based sign language recognition without temporal segmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.10111 (2018)

  7. Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 (2014)

  8. Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Hinton, G.E.: ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 1097–1105 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Lagorce, X., Orchard, G., Galluppi, F., Shi, B.E., Benosman, R.B.: HOTS: a hierarchy of event-based time-surfaces for pattern recognition. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 39(7), 1346–1359 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Lee, J.H., Delbruck, T., Pfeiffer, M.: Training deep spiking neural networks using backpropagation. Front. Neurosci. 10, 508 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Lichtsteiner, P., Posch, C., Delbruck, T.: A 128\(\times \)128 120 db 15\(\mu \) s latency asynchronous temporal contrast vision sensor. IEEE J. Solid-State Circ. 43(2), 566–576 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Diehl, P.U., Cook, M.: Unsupervised learning of digit recognition using spike-timing-dependent plasticity. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 9, 99 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Pigou, L., Dieleman, S., Kindermans, P.-J., Schrauwen, B.: Sign language recognition using convolutional neural networks. In: Agapito, L., Bronstein, M.M., Rother, C. (eds.) ECCV 2014. LNCS, vol. 8925, pp. 572–578. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16178-5_40

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Qi, C.R., Su, H., Mo, K., Guibas, L.J.: PointNet: deep learning on point sets for 3D classification and segmentation (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Wang, Q., Zhang, Y., Yuan, J., Lu, Y.: Space-time event clouds for gesture recognition: from RGB cameras to event cameras. In: 2019 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Wang, Y., et al.: EV-Gait: event-based robust gait recognition using dynamic vision sensors. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 6358–6367 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Wang, Y., et al.: Event-stream representation for human gaits identification using deep neural networks. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Zhu, A.Z., Yuan, L., Chaney, K., Daniilidis, K.: EV-FlowNet: self-supervised optical flow estimation for event-based cameras (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Zhu, A.Z., Yuan, L., Chaney, K., Daniilidis, K.: EV-FlowNet: self-supervised optical flow estimation for event-based cameras. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06898 (2018)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yiran Shen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Wang, Y., Zhang, X., Wang, Y., Wang, H., Huang, C., Shen, Y. (2021). Event-Based American Sign Language Recognition Using Dynamic Vision Sensor. In: Liu, Z., Wu, F., Das, S.K. (eds) Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications. WASA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12939. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86137-7_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86137-7_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-86136-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86137-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics