Procrustes-DTW: Dynamic Time Warping Variant for the Recognition of Sign Language Utterances

[color=#333333; font-family: 'HelveticaNeue Regular', sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial]In this paper we present a method for classifying sign language videos using a variation of dynamic time warping with the Procrustes distance, which is a shape similarity measure appropriate for handshape recognition. We initially extract features from the dominant hand. We then classify the signs using a nearest-neighbor scheme which includes a dynamic time warping variant, which we dub Procrustes-DTW and which is suitable for extracting a similarity measure of sequences of handshapes only. To reduce computational costs it is combined with a curvature-based summarization scheme with a reasonable sacrifice in accuracy. We verify experimentally our approach on a custom dataset and we show its merit compared to the conventional dynamic time warping approach.[/color]