Block-based histogram of optical flow for isolated sign language recognition

In this paper, we propose a block-based histogram of optical flow (BHOF) to generate hand representation in sign language recognition. Optical flow of the sign language video is computed in a region centered around the location of the detected hand position. The hand patches of optical flow are segmented into M spatial blocks, where each block is a cuboid of a segment of a frame across the entire sign gesture video. The histogram of each block is then computed and normalized by its sum. The feature vector of all blocks are then concatenated as the BHOF sign gesture representation. The proposed method provides a compact scale-invariant representation of the sign language. Furthermore, block-based histogram encodes spatial information and provides local translation invariance in the extracted optical flow. Additionally, the proposed BHOF also introduces sign language length invariancy into its representation, and thereby, produce promising recognition rate in signer independent problems.