VisualComm: a tool to support communication between deaf and hearing persons with the Kinect

Abstract

With the quickly increasing of the deaf community, how to communicate with the hearing persons is becoming a serious social problem. Furthermore, the investigation indicates that the deaf community is more self-enclosed and won't exchange ideas with the hearing. To address this challenge, we develop VisualComm, a tool to support communication between deaf and hearing persons with sign language recognition technology by using the Kinect. The main contribution of the system is a holistic solution of a two-way communication between deaf and hearings, and furthermore it is a seamless experience tailored for this particular activity. Currently we have implemented the basic communication based on 370 daily Chinese words for signer.