A Unified Hand-Landmark-Based Deep Learning Framework for Static and Dynamic Vietnamese Sign Language Recognition

Sign language identification and recognition technique is composed by the gesture images detection and the hand gestures recognition. Gesture images detection is to locate the image part of palm and fingers from the captured pictures, and rotating them to the appropriate gesture posture. Both of them are the important pre-processing for sign language identification and recognition. Lose them, the correctness rate of the sign language recognition algorithms will be dropped down to an unacceptable level. This paper presents novel processing algorithms for the gesture images detection and recognition. In the detection process, it rotates an askew gesture to right position, and to delete the elbow and forearm parts from the captured pictures. In the recognition process, it includes two phases with the model construction and the sign language identification. In the model construction phase, the static hand gesture of sign language is constructed by the Gaussian mixture model, and the unknown gesture image is identified by Gaussian model match. Based on this presented static sign language detection and recognition algorithms, the correct recognition rate is about 94% in average.

Automating real-time sign language translation through deep learning and machine learning techniques can greatly enhance communication between the deaf community and the wider public. This research investigates how these technologies can change the way individuals with speech impairments communicate. Despite advancements, developing accurate models for recognizing both static and dynamic gestures remains challenging due to variations in gesture speed and length, which affect the effectiveness of the models. We introduce a hybrid approach that merges machine learning and deep learning methods for sign language recognition. We provide new model for the recognition of Kazakh Sign Language (QazSL), employing five algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with VGG19, ResNet-50, and YOLOv5. The models were trained on a QazSL dataset of more than 4,400 photos. Among the assessed models, the GRU attained the highest accuracy of 100%, followed closely by SVM and YOLOv5 at 99.98%, VGG19 at 98.87% for dynamic dactyls, LSTM at 85%, and ResNet-50 at 78.61%. These findings illustrate the comparative efficacy of each method in real-time gesture recognition. The results yield significant insights for enhancing sign language recognition systems, presenting possible advancements in accessibility and communication for those with hearing impairments.

Losing the ability to speak exerts psychological and social impacts on the affected people due to the lack of proper communication. Thus, Sign Language (SL) is considered a boon to people with hearing and speech impairment. SL has developed as a handy mean of communication that form the core of local deaf cultures. It is a visual–spatial language based on positional and visual components, such as the shape of fingers and hands, their location and orientation as well as arm and body movements. The problem is that SL is not understood by everyone, forming a communication gap between the mute and the able people. Multiple and systematic scholarly interventions that vary according to context have been implemented to overcome disability-related difficulties. Sign language recognition (SLR) systems based on sensory gloves are significant innovations that aim to procure data on the shape or movement of the human hand to bridge this communication gap, as the proposed system. The proposed model is a glove equipped with five flex sensors, interfacing with a control unit fixed on the arm, translating American Sign Language (ASL) and Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) to both text and speech, displayed on a simple Graphical User Interface (GUI). The proposed system aims to provide an affordable and user friendly SL translator system, working on the basis of Machine Learning (ML). However, it adapts to each person’s hand instead of using a generic data set. The system achieved 95% recognition rate with static gestures and up to 88% with dynamic gestures.

Over 300 sign languages are used worldwide, posing challenges for effective communication between deaf and hearing individuals. This study presents a bilingual sign language recognition (SLR) system using deep learning to enhance accessibility for the deaf and mute communities. The system processes real-time video input, leveraging MediaPipe for hand and body landmark extraction. For static gesture classification (e.g., alphabet recognition), a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with a linear kernel is employed. For dynamic gesture sequences (e.g., word-level recognition), a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is used to model temporal patterns. The models were trained on large-scale datasets of Arabic and English sign languages, achieving recognition accuracies exceeding 99% for English letters and over 93% for selected Arabic words. The training dataset consists of images from Kaggle and real-time videos, and the test dataset uses independent real-time videos not seen during training. The system supports sign-to-text translation as well as voice and text-to-sign conversion through avatars or image sequences, promoting inclusive, real-time communication across linguistic boundaries.

Sign language is a complex language that uses hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions and is majorly used by the deaf community. Sign language recognition (SLR) is a popular research domain as it provides an efficient and reliable solution to bridge the communication gap between people who are hard of hearing and those with good hearing. Recognizing isolated sign language words from video is a challenging research area in computer vision. This paper proposes a hybrid SLR framework that combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) and an attention-based long-short-term memory (LSTM) neural network. We used MobileNetV2 as a backbone model due to its lightweight structure, which reduces the complexity of the model architecture for deriving meaningful features from the video frame sequence. The spatial features are fed to LSTM optimized with an attention mechanism to select the significant gesture cues from the video frames and focus on salient features from the sequential data. The proposed method is evaluated on a benchmark WLASL dataset with 100 classes based on precision, recall, F1-score, and 5-fold cross-validation metrics. Our methodology acquired an average accuracy of 84.65%. The experiment results illustrate that our model performed effectively and computationally efficiently compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Sign language is a crucial communication tool for hearing and deaf communities, with each language containing unique hand positions, motion profiles, and shapes. To develop sign language recognition systems, common input data formats include RGB and depth, considering perspective, articulation distributions, joint visibility, and hand shape. However, difficulties endure in intricate and crowded settings, resulting in increased average errors. An improved deep learning method that makes use of Google's MediaPipe framework and combines Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) is suggested as a solution to these problems. While RNNs record temporal correlations in sign language gesture data, CNNs extract spatial characteristics from static images. MediaPipe is essential for preprocessing and feature extraction, as well as for supplying precise hand landmarks and enabling real-time processing. The proposed system shows a significant improvement in recognition accuracy and processing efficiency, with up to 5% improvement in recognition accuracy compared to traditional methods. This work contributes to the advancement of sign language recognition technologies, offering a more reliable and efficient solution for real-time sign language interpretation and text conversion.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals use sign language as a means of communication. However, those around them, especially family members like the children of deaf adults, may face communication challenges if they are unfamiliar with sign language. This issue has prompted numerous researchers to conduct studies on sign language translation and recognition. However, there is currently no publicly available dataset specifically for Malaysian sign language. This article introduces an image dataset of the Malaysian Sign Language (MySL) hand gestures used in everyday situations. The dataset, named MyWSL2023, comprises 3,500 images of ten static Malaysian sign language words collected from five participants (two males and three females) aged between 20 and 21 years old. The data collection took place indoors under normal lighting conditions. The MyWSL2023 dataset, which has been made freely accessible to all researchers, serves as a valuable resource for not only investigating and developing automated systems for hearing-impaired and deaf individuals but also gesture and sign language recognition using vision-based methods. The dataset can be accessed for free at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/zvk55p7ktd.

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has become an essential area of research due to its potential to promote understanding between the deaf and hearing communities through communication. This paper provides an in-depth study of various methodologies and models employed in SLR, focusing on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). We analyze their application to datasets from various sign languages, such as Arabic Sign Language (ArSL), American Sign Language (ASL), and British Sign Language (BSL), and explore how these models improve the recognition of dynamic, multi-dimensional hand gestures. This research not only advances the understanding of deep learning applications in sign language recognition but also addresses critical challenges in data processing and real-time applications, paving the way for inclusive technologies in informatics and human-computer interaction. Despite the progress in applying deep learning techniques to SLR, several challenges remain, particularly in dataset limitations, handling large vocabularies, and ensuring consistent performance across diverse environments and signers. The paper also investigates the broader applications of SLR, such as virtual reality, healthcare, education, and accessibility, and discusses the integration of SLR with human-computer interaction systems. Furthermore, it highlights current limitations in the field, such as difficulties with video data handling, the need for standard datasets, and issues related to training computational models. Finally, the paper outlines future research directions, including developing more robust SLR systems that can function effectively in uncontrolled environments, improving data collection methodologies, and creating real-time, user-friendly applications to assist the community of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals.

Sign Language is one of the method for non-verbal communication. It is most commonly used by deaf or dumb people who have hearing or speech problems to communicate among themselves or with normal people. Vietnamese Sign Language (VSL) is a sign language system used in the community of Vietnamese hearing impaired individuals. VSL recognition aims to develop algorithms and methods to correctly identify a sequence of produced signs and to understand their meaning in Vietnamese. However, automatic VSL recognition in video has many challenges due to the orientation of camera, hand position and movement, inter hand relation, etc. In this paper, we present some feature extraction approaches for VSL recognition includes spatial feature, scene-based feature, and especially motion-based feature. Instead of relying on a static image, we specifically capture motion information between frames in a video sequence. We evaluated the proposed framework on our acquired VSL dataset including 23 alphabets, 3 diacritic marks and 5 tones in Vietnamese language with 2D camera. Additionally, in order to gain more information of hand movement and hand position, we also used the data augmentation technique. All these helpful information would contribute to an effective VSL recognition system. The experiments achieved the satisfactory results with 86.61%. It indicates that data augmentation technique provides more information about the orientation of hand. Moreover, the combination of spatial, scene and especially motion information could help the system to be able to capture information from both single frame and from multiple frames, and thus the performance of VSL recognition system could be improved.

Hand gesture identification is one of problems being widely studied. There are two research trends corresponding to two data types, which are static and dynamic gestures. The static gesture is recognized based on the hand shape, while motion is the main feature in identifying dynamic gestures. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling the dynamic hand gestures based on a combination of two mentioned information. At first, the hand silhouette is extracted using a skin-color filter. A sequence of geometric manipulations is then performed to remove the possible arm. The characteristics which describe the hand shape and motion orientation are estimated. Finally, the k-means clustering technique is combined with hidden Markov model to model each dynamic gesture. The experiments are performed on human-computer interaction dataset and obtain high efficiency.

A major challenge faced by our society is the difficulty individuals with disabilities encounter in expressing their emotions to others. People with disabilities often depend on sign (gesture) languages for communication. This project aims to develop a model capable of recognizing and translating sign language alphabets from hand gestures into text and audio. The primary objective is to enhance communication between individuals with hearing impairments and the broader society. We assessed our model's performance using a publicly accessible Indian Sign Language (ISL) dataset. For image classification, we employed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the Inception V3 architecture. Hand gestures are captured through webcams, and our model identifies the corresponding alphabet for each gesture. This project seeks to overcome current challenges in Sign Language Recognition and aims to enhance its effectiveness and efficiency.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have provided great advances for the task of sign language recognition (SLR). However, recurrent neural networks (RNN) in the form of long–short-term memory (LSTM) have become a means for providing solutions to problems involving sequential data. This research proposes the development of a sign language translation system that converts Panamanian Sign Language (PSL) signs into text in Spanish using an LSTM model that, among many things, makes it possible to work with non-static signs (as sequential data). The deep learning model presented focuses on action detection, in this case, the execution of the signs. This involves processing in a precise manner the frames in which a sign language gesture is made. The proposal is a holistic solution that considers, in addition to the seeking of the hands of the speaker, the face and pose determinants. These were added due to the fact that when communicating through sign languages, other visual characteristics matter beyond hand gestures. For the training of this system, a data set of 330 videos (of 30 frames each) for five possible classes (different signs considered) was created. The model was tested having an accuracy of 98.8%, making this a valuable base system for effective communication between PSL users and Spanish speakers. In conclusion, this work provides an improvement of the state of the art for PSL–Spanish translation by using the possibilities of translatable signs via deep learning.

Sign language recognition devices are effective approaches to breaking the communication barrier between signers and non-signers and exploring human-machine interactions. Wearable gloves have been developed for gesture recognition and virtual reality applications by employing flexible sensors for motion detection and machine learning for data analysis. However, most existing wearable devices present limited sign language translating capacity due to the sensors' design and distribution. Here, we propose a cost-effective dual-hand soft fiber optic glove system consisting of multimode soft liquid-core fiber optic sensors, gyroscopes, wireless printed circuit boards, and batteries for sign language translation. In combination with different deep learning techniques and recognition strategies, the glove system can recognize static gestures and dynamic gestures of American Sign Language, and deduce the meaning of sentences by the sequence of gestures. The soft glove system exhibits a broad sign language range (10 numbers, 26 alphabets, 18 words, and 5 sentences meaning prediction), and high recognition accuracy (98.6% for static gestures, 95% for dynamic gestures). The results also present the recognizing capacity for high-correlated gestures (e.g., “M” and “N”). Finally, we demonstrate its application for controlling the motion of a virtual character through 7 discrete commands in the VR interface.

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has been an active area of research, but sentence-level SLR remains relatively underexplored. While most studies focus on recognizing individual signs, understanding full sentences presents greater challenges. This research proposes a sentence-level SLR using a combination of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNN) for spatio-temporal feature extraction with sequential modeling using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM). Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) is also used to enable training without word-level annotations. In this study, we used the Indonesian Sign Language (BISINDO) dataset, specifically the DKI Jakarta version, consisting of 900 videos representing 30 sentences, which was expanded to 3600 videos through data augmentation techniques such as speed variation and brightness adjustments. All videos underwent preprocessing to ensure data quality, and Bayesian Optimization was applied for hyperparameter tuning to obtain optimal configurations for each model. Both models were trained with CTC loss and evaluated using Word Error Rate (WER). The 3DCNN-LSTM model achieved a WER result of 59.21%, while the 3DCNN-BiLSTM presents a significantly better performance with a WER of 2.77%. Despite these promising results, the models’ ability to generalize across different signers may require further research, as the dataset used in this research involved only a single signer.

The current research looks into using convolutional neural networks, also known as CNNs, to develop a hand sign understanding and conversion system. The study addresses the urgent need for a precise and effective way to close the communication gap that exists between the hearing and the deaf communities. The study examines how well CNNs can identify and translate hand sign gestures into text, giving sign language users a real-time means of communication. We use three steps in our methodology: gathering datasets, training models, and thorough assessment. The outcomes show encouraging hand sign recognition accuracy, creating new opportunities for inclusive communication. Sign language is one of the oldest and most natural forms of language for communication, but since most people do not know sign language and interpreters are very difficult to come by, we have come up with a real-time method using neural networks for fingerspelling-based American sign language. In our method, the hand is first passed through a filter and after the filter is applied the hand is passed through a classifier which predicts the class of the hand gestures. Our method provides 95.7 % accuracy for the 26 letters of the alphabet. Keywords-Sign Language, ASL, Hearing disability, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Gesture recognition, Sign language recognition, Hue Saturation Value algorithm.