Abstract
In today’s world, the need of communication is great to understand what the people in front of us are saying and to convey them in a very convenient way what we are saying. Communication is necessary part of knowledge transfer, but it is not possible for every person to know all the possible languages. Especially when a person has certain limitations or compromised faculties, it is very necessary to have a way to find a common ground of understanding. The question certainly comes to mind as to why a person who has hands would use sign language instead of typing the document himself. There could be many reasons for this. The person can be blind, deaf or mute himself or must be trying to communicate with the other person who is blind, deaf or mute. In addition, the research has shown that a deaf or hard-of-hearing person gestures faster than typing. Therefore, the application ‘TalkingHand’ gives them a chance to use their preferred method of talking using their hands while giving other person option to use his preferred method of understanding i.e. reading the English alphabets. Carrying this thought in mind, I had proposed a desktop application to recognize American Sign Language gestures. This application captures gestures from the video recording, recognizes the gesture made as one of the 26 alphabets of English language and displays the output in the form of text. Different algorithms are used to recognize different alphabets and the choice of the algorithm is made based on the captured gesture and the most closely matching pattern.