C. Stephanidis (Ed.): Posters, Part I, HCII 2013, CCIS 373, pp. 286–290, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Development of Recognition System of Japanese Sign Language Using 3D Image Sensor Yanhua Sun, Noriaki Kuwahara, and Kazunari Morimoto Graduate School of Science and Technology Kyoto Institute of Technology Matsugasaki, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-85858, Japan oo_alison@hotmail.com {noriaki.kuwahara,morix119}@gmail.com Abstract. The population of Japanese people with disabilities is growing day by day. And the population of sign language translator is too few to support them. In general life, people communicate with others through conversation but this is obviously impossible for deaf mute people who use sign language to communicate. So it is necessary to explore a recognition system of sign language which can help the deaf and mute to keep in touch with others. In order to solve that problem, a large amount of researches related to recognition system development and establishment have been reported by previous literatures. However, current paper introduced a novel method for system developing. In this paper, 3D sensors called Kinect were employed for hand gesture dataset’s collection following by data dealing from transformation matrix based on specific formulas. Although the hand gesture can be captured, but there still are a lot of noises left, so PCL (Point Cloud Library) was applied to do the 3D data processing. Keywords: Japanese Sign Language, Kinect, Recognition of JSL, 3D Sensor. 1 Introduction In Japan, the population of people with disabilities who are deaf and mute or hard of hearing and speaking is about 2.7million. It is said that about 3 thousand people do a job as a sign language translator. There are so little people to support the deaf and mute. In general life, people take the communication with the others through talking, but it is impossible for the deaf mute people, who can take the communication with others just using sign language. So it is necessary to explore a recognition system of sign language, which can help the deaf and mute to keep touch with others. So developing a recognition system of sign language is the purpose of this paper. About the system, Sign language recognition is such a system which translate the picture of the sign language to data, and then translate the data to words, sentences or sounds. This paper presents the front part of the recognition system. Several ways are used to research the sign language recognition, such as Facial movement analysis in ASL [5], human detection [3], 3D model tracking [4] and so on. But in most of the researches, even though they carry important grammatical and prosodic information, the rate of the recognition is still low.