Sign Language based SMS Generator for Hearing Impaired People

Abstract

Sign language (SL) stands for the language which essentially requires manual communication to convey the meaning of a sentence or a word unlikely than the acoustically conveyed sound patterns. In addition to combining hand shapes, orientation and hands movement, body or arms, it includes facial expressions to convey the thoughts of a disabled speaker. A large portion of hard of hearing people are deprived of any education and just about 1-2 % of the deaf have access to schooling in this country by the use of sign language. Conferring to the available information, in India there are about 24 million persons who are hearing impaired and only 5% of them go to schools. Because of the scarce availability of sources in India that can give instruction as well as education to hearing impaired people, there is an absence of language and literacy skills among the disabled. Since SL does not have any theoretical form and producing signs using video approach is very expensive, Sign animation is best option available. Hence, there is a need of automated system in order to overcome this problem, thereby improving communications skills among deaf community. In this study, the creation of an SMS generator for deaf people in Indian Sign Language has been proposed. The system will be supported with a virtual keyboard and corresponding signs for the words so selected from the suggested words will be shown on the interface. This system, has been deployed into four modular functionalities: the first one includes advanced visual interface for a deaf person to indicate sign sequence or enter ISL sentence which is to be converted into English with the use of a language translator , second one sends that English sentence as an SMS to the near and dear ones of the deaf person, third module converts the English sentence into speech using text-to-speech translation system, the fourth module is an animation module for playing the sign actions through the GIF file corresponding to the ISL sentence. Hence, in this way the system so proposed is extremely advantageous for interacting with deaf people face to face and is also beneficial for hearing impaired in communicating through SMS even with the people who are unaware about the Indian Sign Language.