Pilot Implementation of the Ecuadorian Sign Language Through the Insertion of Video Tracks for Digital Terrestrial Television

Abstract

This article presents a pilot solution for the automatic insertion of video tracks in Ecuadorian sign language in the multimedia content of Digital Terrestrial Television, in order to reduce the barriers that are inserted for people with hearing disabilities when accessing to information due to their inherent difficulties in dealing with spoken and written languages. Initially, a transport type TS (Transport Stream) with Closed Caption service was generated, based on the standards of the ISDB-Tb digital television standard, established by ARIB (Association of Broadcasting Industries and Businesses). Later an algorithm is specified that allows the extraction of the Closed Caption text and generates the insertion of Ecuadorian sign language video tracks, called LSEC tracks, in the original multimedia content. These video tracks were created by the authors and represent words from the oral language, in Ecuadorian sign language through a 3D-avatar. Finally, a qualitative evaluation was carried out on the accessible content generated by the proposed solution and an analysis of the results obtained is presented.