This paper presents an approach for carrying out gesture recognition for the Brazilian Sign Language Manual Alphabet. The gestural patterns are treated as a combination of three primitives, or cheremes - hand configuration, hand orientation and hand movement. The recognizer is built in a modular architecture composed by inductive reasoning modules, which use the artificial neural network Fuzzy Learning Vector Quantization; and rule-based modules. This architecture has been tested and results are presented here. Some strengths of such approach are: robustness of recognition, portability to similar contexts, extensibility of the dataset to be recognize and reduction of the vocabulary recognition problem to the recognition of its primitives.

In this paper, the vision-based hand movement recognition problem is formulated for the universe of discourse of the Brazilian Sign Language. In order to analyze this specific domain we have used the artificial neural networks models based on distance, including neural-fuzzy models. The experiments explored here show the usefulness of these models to extract helpful knowledge about the classes of movements and to support the project of adaptative recognizer modules for Libras-oriented computational tools. Using artificial neural networks architectures - Self Organizing Maps and (Fuzzy) Learning Vector Quantization, it was possible to understand the data space and to build models able to recognize hand movements performed for one or more than one specific Libras users.