Vision-based sign language translation device

Abstract

This report presents a mobile VISION-BASED SIGN LANGUAGE TRANSLATION DEVICE for automatic translation of Indian sign language into speech in English to assist the hearing and/or speech impaired people to communicate with hearing people. It could be used as a translator for people that do not understand sign language, avoiding by this way the intervention of an intermediate person and allow communication using their natural way of speaking. The proposed system is an interactive application program developed using LABVIEW software and incorporated into a mobile phone. The sign language gesture images are acquired using the inbuilt camera of the mobile phone; vision analysis functions are performed in the operating system and provide speech output through the inbuilt audio device thereby minimizing hardware requirements and expense. The experienced lag time between the sign language and the translation is little because of parallel processing. This allows for almost instantaneous recognition from finger and hand movements to translation. This is able to recognize one handed sign representations of alphabets (A-Z) and numbers (0-9).The results are found to be highly consistent, reproducible, with fairly high precision and accuracy.