Modified Sift Algorithm for Appearance Based Recognition of American Sign Language

The concern of the paper is to investigate the application of the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) to the problem of hand gesture recognition by using MATLAB. The algorithm uses modified SIFT approach to match key-points between the query image and the original database of Bare Hand images taken. The extracted features are highly distinctive as they are shift, scale and rotation invariant. They are also partially invariant to illumination and affine transformations. All these properties make them very suitable to the problem at hand. Performance improvement for SIFT also has been proposed. Experimental results show the efficient performance of the developed algorithm in terms of recognizing all the images provided in the training set.