Towards an Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) corpus for deaf drivers

Sign language is a common language that deaf people around the world use to communicate with others. However, normal people are generally not familiar with sign language (SL) and they do not need to learn their language to communicate with them in everyday life. Several technologies offer possibilities for overcoming these barriers to assisting deaf people and facilitating their active lives, including natural language processing (NLP), text understanding, machine translation, and sign language simulation. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem faced by the deaf community in Saudi Arabia as an important member of the society that needs assistance in communicating with others, especially in the field of work as a driver. Therefore, this community needs a system that facilitates the mechanism of communication with the users using NLP that allows translating Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) into voice and vice versa. Thus, this paper aims to purplish our created dataset dictionary and ArSL corpus videos that were done in our previous work. Furthermore, we illustrate our corpus, data determination (deaf driver terminologies), dataset creation and processing in order to implement the proposed future system. Therefore, the evaluation of the dataset will be presented and simulated using two methods. First, using the evaluation of four expert signers, where the result was 10.23% WER. The second method, using Cohen’s Kappa in order to evaluate the corpus of ArSL videos that was made by three signers from different regions of Saudi Arabia. We found that the agreement between signer 2 and signer 3 is 61%, which is a good agreement. In our future direction, we will use the ArSL video corpus of signer 2 and signer 3 to implement ML techniques for our deaf driver system.

Machine Learning Approach for Gesture Based Arabic Sign Language Recognition for Impaired People

Exceptional research activities have been endorsed by the Arabic Sign Language for recognizing gestures and hand signs utilizing the deep learning model. Sign languages refer to the gestures, which are utilized by hearing impaired people for communication. These gestures are complex for understanding by normal people. Due to variation of Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) from one territory to another territory or between countries, the recognition of Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) became an arduous research problem. The recognition of Arabic Sign Language has been learned and implemented utilizing multiple traditional and intelligent approaches and there were only less attempts made for enhancing the process with the help of deep learning networks. The proposed system here encapsulates a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based machine learning technique, which utilizes wearable sensors for recognition of the Arabic Sign Language (ArSL). The model suits to all local Arabic gestures, which are used by the hearing-impaired people of the local Arabic community. The proposed system has a reasonable and moderate accuracy. Initially a deep Convolutional network is built for feature extraction, which is extracted from the collected data by the wearable sensors. These sensors are used for recognizing accurately the 30 hand sign letters of the Arabic sign language. DG5-V hand gloves embedded with wearable sensors are used for capturing the hand movements in the dataset. The CNN approach is utilized for the classification purpose. The hand gestures of the Arabic sign language are the input and the vocalized speech is the output of the proposed system. The results achieved a recognition rate of 90%. The proposed system was found highly efficient for translating hand gestures of the Arabic Sign Language into speech and writing.

Arabic Sign Language Recognition System for Alphabets Using Machine Learning Techniques

In recent years, the role of pattern recognition in systems based on human computer interaction (HCI) has spread in terms of computer vision applications and machine learning, and one of the most important of these applications is to recognize the hand gestures used in dealing with deaf people, in particular to recognize the dashed letters in surahs of the Quran. In this paper, we suggest an Arabic Alphabet Sign Language Recognition System (AArSLRS) using the vision-based approach. The proposed system consists of four stages: the stage of data processing, preprocessing of data, feature extraction, and classification. The system deals with three types of datasets: data dealing with bare hands and a dark background, data dealing with bare hands, but with a light background, and data dealing with hands wearing dark colored gloves. AArSLRS begins with obtaining an image of the alphabet gestures, then revealing the hand from the image and isolating it from the background using one of the proposed methods, after which the hand features are extracted according to the selection method used to extract them. Regarding the classification process in this system, we have used supervised learning techniques for the classification of 28-letter Arabic alphabet using 9240 images. We focused on the classification for 14 alphabetic letters that represent the first Quran surahs in the Quranic sign language (QSL). AArSLRS achieved an accuracy of 99.5% for the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier.

Static hand gesture recognition of Arabic sign language by using deep CNNs

An Arabic sign language recognition using two concatenated deep convolution neural network models DenseNet121 & VGG16 is presented. The pre-trained models are fed with images, and then the system can automatically recognize the Arabic sign language. To evaluate the performance of concatenated two models in the Arabic sign language recognition, the red-green-blue (RGB) images for various static signs are collected in a dataset. The dataset comprises 220,000 images for 44 categories: 32 letters, 11 numbers (0:10), and 1 for none. For each of the static signs, there are 5000 images collected from different volunteers. The pre-trained models were used and trained on prepared Arabic sign language data. These models were used after some modification. Also, an attempt has been made to adopt two models from the previously trained models, where they are trained in parallel deep feature extractions. Then they are combined and prepared for the classification stage. The results demonstrate the comparison between the performance of the single model and multi-model. It appears that most of the multi-model is better in feature extraction and classification than the single models. And also show that when depending on the total number of incorrect recognize sign image in training, validation and testing dataset, the best convolutional neural networks (CNN) model in feature extraction and classification Arabic sign language is the DenseNet121 for a single model using and DenseNet121 & VGG16 for multi-model using.

Towards Hybrid Multimodal Manual and Non-Manual Arabic Sign Language Recognition: mArSL Database and Pilot Study

Sign languages are the main visual communication medium between hard-hearing people and their societies. Similar to spoken languages, they are not universal and vary from region to region, but they are relatively under-resourced. Arabic sign language (ArSL) is one of these languages that has attracted increasing attention in the research community. However, most of the existing and available works on sign language recognition systems focus on manual gestures, ignoring other non-manual information needed for other language signals such as facial expressions. One of the main challenges of not considering these modalities is the lack of suitable datasets. In this paper, we propose a new multi-modality ArSL dataset that integrates various types of modalities. It consists of 6748 video samples of fifty signs performed by four signers and collected using Kinect V2 sensors. This dataset will be freely available for researchers to develop and benchmark their techniques for further advancement of the field. In addition, we evaluated the fusion of spatial and temporal features of different modalities, manual and non-manual, for sign language recognition using the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. This fusion boosted the accuracy of the recognition system at the signer-independent mode by 3.6% compared with manual gestures.