Abanoub R. Wadie

In the discipline of hand gesture and dynamic sign language recognition, deep learning approaches with high computational complexity and a wide range of parameters have been an extremely remarkable success. However, the implementation of sign language recognition applications for mobile phones with restricted storage and computing capacities is usually greatly constrained by those limited resources. In light of this situation, we suggest lightweight deep neural networks with advanced processing for real-time dynamic sign language recognition (DSLR). This paper presents a DSLR application to minimize the gap between hearing-impaired communities and regular society. The DSLR application was developed using two robust deep learning models, the GRU and the 1D CNN, combined with the MediaPipe framework. In this paper, the authors implement advanced processes to solve most of the DSLR problems, especially in real-time detection, e.g., differences in depth and location. The solution method consists of three main parts. First, the input dataset is preprocessed with our algorithm to standardize the number of frames. Then, the MediaPipe framework extracts hands and poses landmarks (features) to detect and locate them. Finally, the features of the models are passed after processing the unification of the depth and location of the body to recognize the DSL accurately. To accomplish this, the authors built a new American video-based sign dataset and named it DSL-46. DSL-46 contains 46 daily used signs that were presented with all the needed details and properties for recording the new dataset. The results of the experiments show that the presented solution method can recognize dynamic signs extremely fast and accurately, even in real-time detection. The DSLR reaches an accuracy of 98.8%, 99.84%, and 88.40% on the DSL-46, LSA64, and LIBRAS-BSL datasets, respectively.

Communication for hearing-impaired communities is an exceedingly challenging task, which is why dynamic sign language was developed. Hand gestures and body movements are used to represent vocabulary in dynamic sign language. However, dynamic sign language faces some challenges, such as recognizing complicated hand gestures and low recognition accuracy, in addition to each vocabulary’s reliance on a series of frames. This paper used MediaPipe in conjunction with RNN models to address dynamic sign language recognition issues. MediaPipe was used to determine the location, shape, and orientation by extracting keypoints of the hands, body, and face. RNN models such as GRU, LSTM, and Bi-directional LSTM address the issue of frame dependency in sign movement. Due to the lack of video-based datasets for sign language, the DSL10-Dataset was created. DSL10-Dataset contains ten vocabularies that were repeated 75 times by five signers providing the guiding steps for creating such one. Two experiments are carried out on our dataset (DSL10-Dataset) using RNN models to compare the accuracy of dynamic sign language recognition with and without the use of face keypoints. Experiments revealed that our model had an accuracy of more than 99%.