A comparison between end-to-end approaches and feature extraction based approaches for Sign Language recognition

In this work we use a new image dataset for Irish Sign Language (ISL) and we compare different approaches for recognition. We perform experiments and report comparative accuracy and timing. We perform tests over blurred images and compare results with non-blurred images. For classification, we use end-to-end approach, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and feature based extraction approaches, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by different classifiers, i.e. multilayer perceptron (MLP). We obtain a recognition accuracy over 99% for both approaches. In addition, we report different ways to split the training and testing dataset, being one iterative and the other one random selected