American Sign Language recognition system for hearing impaired people using Cartesian Genetic Programming

American Sign Language (ASL) is a well developed and standard way of communication for hearing impaired people living in English speaking communities. Since the advent of modern technology, different intelligent computer-aided applications have been developed that can recognize hand gestures and hence translate gestures into understandable forms. In this paper, ASL based hand gesture recognition system is presented that uses evolutionary programming technique called Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP). Hand gesture images representing different English alphabets are used to train the CGP based system and then it is tested for a different set of images. The sign recognition accuracy obtained is around 90%. Also, a chat application is proposed with a possible solution to boost the accuracy of the recognition up to 100%.