In modern society, people should not be identified based on their disability, rather, it is environments that can disable people with impairments. Improvements to automatic Sign Language Recognition (SLR) will lead to more enabling environments via digital technology. Many state-of-the-art approaches to SLR focus on the classification of static hand gestures, but communication is a temporal activity, which is reflected by many of the dynamic gestures present. Given this, temporal information during the delivery of a gesture is not often considered within SLR. The experiments in this work consider the problem of SL gesture recognition regarding how dynamic gestures change during their delivery, and this study aims to explore how single types of features as well as mixed features affect the classification ability of a machine learning model. 18 common gestures recorded via a Leap Motion Controller sensor provide a complex classification problem. Two sets of features are extracted from a 0.6 second time window, statistical descriptors and spatio-temporal attributes. Features from each set are compared by their ANOVA F-Scores and p-values, arranged into bins grown by 10 features per step to a limit of the 250 highest-ranked features. Results show that the best statistical model selected 240 features and scored 85.96% accuracy, the best spatio-temporal model selected 230 features and scored 80.98%, and the best mixed-feature model selected 240 features from each set leading to a classification accuracy of 86.75%. When all three sets of results are compared (146 individual machine learning models), the overall distribution shows that the minimum results are increased when inputs are any number of mixed features compared to any number of either of the two single sets of features.

本研究旨在探讨单一特征和混合特征对机器学习模型分类能力的影响，通过提取统计描述符和时空属性两类特征来识别含18种动态手势的手语，结果表明混合特征的输入比两类单一特征的输入产生更好的分类效果，对于自动手语识别技术的提高对其实现数字化技术的残疾人群体更有益。

使用Leap Motion传感器的统计和时空手势特征实现手语识别