Sign language is designed to assist the deaf and hard of hearing community to convey messages and connect with society. Sign language recognition has been an important domain of research for a long time. Previously, sensor-based approaches have obtained higher accuracy than vision-based approaches. Due to the cost-effectiveness of vision-based approaches, researchers have been conducted here also despite the accuracy drop. The purpose of this research is to recognize American sign characters using hand images obtained from a web camera. In this work, the media-pipe hands algorithm was used for estimating hand joints from RGB images of hands obtained from a web camera and two types of features were generated from the estimated coordinates of the joints obtained for classification: one is the distances between the joint points and the other one is the angles between vectors and 3D axes. The classifiers utilized to classify the characters were support vector machine (SVM) and light gradient boosting machine (GBM). Three character datasets were used for recognition: the ASL Alphabet dataset, the Massey dataset, and the finger spelling A dataset. The results obtained were 99.39% for the Massey dataset, 87.60% for the ASL Alphabet dataset, and 98.45% for Finger Spelling A dataset. The proposed design for automatic American sign language recognition is cost-effective, computationally inexpensive, does not require any special sensors or devices, and has outperformed previous studies.

As it is the seventh most-spoken language and fifth most-spoken native language in the world, the domain of Bengali handwritten character recognition has fascinated researchers for decades. Although other popular languages i.e., English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, etc. have received many contributions in the area of handwritten character recognition, Bengali has not received many noteworthy contributions in this domain because of the complex curvatures and similar writing fashions of Bengali characters. Previously, studies were conducted by using different approaches based on traditional learning, and deep learning. In this research, we proposed a low-cost novel convolutional neural network architecture for the recognition of Bengali characters with only 2.24 to 2.43 million parameters based on the number of output classes. We considered 8 different formations of CMATERdb datasets based on previous studies for the training phase. With experimental analysis, we showed that our proposed system outperformed previous works by a noteworthy margin for all 8 datasets. Moreover, we tested our trained models on other available Bengali characters datasets such as Ekush, BanglaLekha, and NumtaDB datasets. Our proposed architecture achieved 96–99% overall accuracies for these datasets as well. We believe our contributions will be beneficial for developing an automated high-performance recognition tool for Bengali handwritten characters.

Human activity recognition is one of the most difficult tasks in computer vision. Due to the lack of time information, detecting human activities from still photos is more difficult than sensor-based or videobased techniques. Recently, various deep learning based solutions are being proposed one after another, and their performance is constantly improving. In this paper, we proposed a convolutional neural architecture by ensembling transfer learning based multi-channel attention networks. Here, four CNN branches were used to make feature fusion based ensembling and in each branch, an attention module was used to extract the contextual information from the feature map produced by existing pre-trained models. Finally, the extracted feature maps from four branches were concatenated and fed to fully connected network to produce the final recognition output. We considered 3 different datasets, Stanford 40 actions, BU-101 and Willow human actions datasets to evaluate our system. Experimental analysis showed that the proposed ensembled convolutional architecture outperformed previous works by a noteworthy margin.

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