Abstract
A real time communication between deaf and hearing people is still a barrier that isolates the deaf people from the hearing world. Over ninety percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents. However, most of them can only learn how to communicate using sign language at school. One of the reasons is that the hearings parents have neither enough time nor support to learn sign language to communicate and support their children. Not surprisingly, the deaf finds difficulties in the oral-only education. Since many other hearing pupils do not even know about the existence of sign language, they cannot communicate directly with the deaf without a sign language interpreter. Therefore, to enable a face-to-face conversation between deaf and hearing people, it is important not only to sustain real time conversation between the deaf and their hearing counterparts but also to equip the hearing with basics of sign language. However, speech to sign conversion remains a challenge due to dialectal and sign language variation, speech utterance and lack of sign language written form. In this paper, a solution named Face-to-Face Conversation Deaf and Hearing people—FFCDH is proposed to address above issues. FFCDH supports real time conversation and also allows the hearing to learn the signs with the same meaning as the deaf understand. Moreover, FFCDH records the speech of the hearing and converts it into signs for the deaf. It also provides deaf with an option to adjust volume of their speech by displaying volume of their voice. The performance of the system in supporting the deaf has been evaluated by using a real test-bed. The obtained results show that English and Japanese daily conversation phrases can be recognized with over 90 percent accuracy on average. The average coherent of simple content is over 94 percent. However, when the speech includes long and complex phrases, the average accuracy and the coherent are slightly lower because the system could not comprehend long and complex context at large scope.
Highlights
In deaf education, the most formidable challenge to deal with is to find the best means of communication
A real time communication between deaf and hearing people is still a barrier that isolates the deaf people from the hearing world
A solution named Face-to-Face Conversation Deaf and Hearing people—FFCDH is proposed to address above issues
Summary
The most formidable challenge to deal with is to find the best means of communication. Some deaf students have had a difficult experience to attend regular schools, where verbal or written language is dominantly used as the means of communication and instructional tool. When deaf people study or join a meeting with hearing ones, the communication is generally accomplished by one or more sign language interpreters [4] [5]. Majority of the deaf individuals use sign language as their first language and learn verbal or written languages later in their lifetime. The number of means of communication for the deaf people has increased and in turn several studies are focusing on supporting speech to sign translation systems so as to sustain real time communication between deaf and hearing people
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