A new approach of sign language recognition system for bilingual users

Abstract

Sign language is becoming increasingly popular day by day to make a bridge between the hearing impaired and normal people. It is a very challenging task in respect of developing country like Bangladesh where around 2.4 million people use Bangla sign language. In this respect we propose a simple, low cost Bangla sign language translation (BSLT) system that can translate sign into Bangla text. We report on the development of universal interpreter software (UIS) that can be used by both the American and the Bangladeshi users. For this, an efficient method is proposed for skin detection & feature extraction. Our system can recognize 16 Bengali words & 11 Bengali numbers. We train our system using a database of (27×10×20) images, i.e. 10 persons containing 20 images per sign & for testing we use another 2700 (27×10×10) images. The system results in about 96.463% accuracy as compared to K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm.