An eight-layer convolutional neural network with stochastic pooling, batch normalization and dropout for fingerspelling recognition of Chinese sign language

Fingerspelling recognition of Chinese sign language rendered an opportunity to smooth the communication barriers of hearing-impaired people and health people, which occupies an important position in sign language recognition. This study proposed an eight-layer convolutional neural network, combined with three advanced techniques: batch normalization, dropout, and stochastic pooling. The output of the stochastic pooling was obtained via sampling from a multinomial distribution formed from the activations of each pooling region. In addition, we used data augmentation method to enhance the training set. In total 10 runs were implemented with the hold-out randomly set for each run. Our method achieved the highest accuracy of 90.91% and overall accuracy of 89.32 ± 1.07%, which was superior to three state-of-the-art approaches compared.