Software based sign language converter

Abstract

Sign language is a way of communication bypeople suffering from hearing loss. Around 360 million people globally suffer from disabling hearing loss out of which 328 million are adults and 32 million children. Hearing impairment greater than 40 decibels (dB) in the better hearing ear is referred as a disabling hearing loss. Thus, with increasing number of people with deafness, there is also a rise in demand for translators. Minimizing the communication gap between hearing impaired and normal people becomes a necessity to ensure effective communication among all. To develop a communication approach for healthy people to understand sign language used by hearing impaired people with ease, in this paper we propose a method of converting the cue symbols (ASL Gestures) to speech using graphical programming (LabVIEW) reducing the limitation of the existing system, thereby eliminating the need for a translator. The proposed system includes a hand gesture recognition system, where gestures are given as input to LabVIEW and the corresponding output is in the form of text as well as speech. For example, when the hearing impaired person shows the gesture for number 5, then text output gives ‘FIVE’ and the same is converted into speech.