A Linguistic Perspective on Radar Micro-Doppler Analysis of American Sign Language

Although users of American Sign Language (ASL) comprise a significant minority in the U.S. and Canada, people in the Deaf community have been unable to benefit from many new technologies, which depend upon vocalized speech, and are designed for hearing individuals. While video has led to tremendous advances in ASL recognition, concerns over invasion of privacy have limited its use for in-home smart environments. This work presents initial work on the use of RF sensors, which can protect user privacy, for the purpose of ASL recognition. The new offerings of 2D/3D RF data representations and optical flow are presented. The fractal complexity of ASL is shown to be greater than that of daily activities - a relationship consistent with linguistic analysis conducted using video.