Assistive Sign Language Converter for Deaf and Dumb
Lakshmi Boppana, Rasheed Ahamed, Harshali Rane, Ravi Kishore Kodali · 2019
Deaf and dumb people are humans at the deepest psychological level. Many of these people are not even exposed to sign languages and it is observed that it gives a great relief on a psychological level, when they find out about signing to connect themselves with others by expressing their love or emotions. About 5% population in world are suffering from hearing loss. Deaf and dumb people use sign language as their primary means to express their thoughts and ideas to the people around them with different hand and body gestures. There are only about 250 certified sign language interpreters in India for a deaf population of around 7 million. In this work, the design of prototype of an assistive device for Deaf-mute people is presented so as to reduce this communication gap with the normal people. This device is portable and can hang over the neck. This device allows the person to communicate with sign hand postures in order to recognize different gestures based signs. The controller of this assistive device is developed for processing the images of gestures by employing various imageprocessing techniques and deep learning models to recognize the sign. This sign is converted into speech in real-time using text-to-speech module.