American Sign Language: Detection and Automatic Text Generation

Abstract

In our daily life, communication is crucial. For people who are hard of hearing (deaf or/and mute) sign language is the means of their communication. Nonetheless, many people are still unaware of sign languages, resulting in a communication gap. To improve communication between deaf-mutes and the hearing majority, this paper proposes an ASL (American Sign Language) detection system for 26 alphabets and three assisted signs, which can detect ASL captured by a standard computer camera, then generate an automatic text. SSD-MobileNet is used as the object detection model. The proposed system achieved precision and recall of 82.8% and 85.5% respectively.