Abstract:
As stated by World Health Organization(WHO), it is estimated that over 466 million people
around the globe that are suffering from hearing loss that is disabling. [1]. In those 466
million people some are completely deaf that basically have little or no functional sense of
hearing at all and the other are called “hard of hearing” who have mild-to-moderate hearing
loss. Deaf people practice sign language to communicate whereas the hard of hearing can
use sign language and spoken language with aid too. Deaf communicate in sign language as
their first language. Abled people perhaps have little or no knowledge of sign language at
all. Deaf people have difficulty in correspondence on a daily basis. A sign language
interpreter may be used. But a sign language interpreter is expensive to have accessible all
the time, and it becomes inconvenient too. A solution to this problem is needed, that is
economical and easy to use. Hence, our final year project proposes a solution to this problem
that is easy to use and have too. The solution wished-for being an android application works
both ways. First as a listener i.e. it detects the signs performed by the deaf person using
Smart phone/tablets camera or a device such as Kinect and translate them to native spoken
language in form of text on an android tablet/Smart Phones screen. Secondly as a speaker
i.e. it takes the text in natively spoken language typed by the abled person through the
keyboard and converts it into a series of signs which are implemented on a 3D avatar on the
screen of the Smart phone/ tablet.
