Automated sign language recognition is one of the important areas of computer vision today, because of its applicability in vast fields of life. This paper presents automated recognition of signs taken from Pakistani Sign Language (PSL). The paper presents empirical analysis of two statistical and one transformation based shape descriptors for the recognition of PSL. A purely vision based, efficient, signer independent, multi-aspect invariant method is proposed for the recognition of 44 signs of PSL. The method has proved its worth by utilizing a very small shape descriptor and giving promising results for a reasonable size of sign dictionary. The proposed methodology achieved an accuracy of 92%.