American Sign Language Recognition using Deep Learning and Computer Vision

Speech impairment is a disability which affects an individuals ability to communicate using speech and hearing. People who are affected by this use other media of communication such as sign language. Although sign language is ubiquitous in recent times, there remains a challenge for non-sign language speakers to communicate with sign language speakers or signers. With recent advances in deep learning and computer vision there has been promising progress in the fields of motion and gesture recognition using deep learning and computer vision based techniques. The focus of this work is to create a vision based application which offers sign language translation to text thus aiding communication between signers and non-signers. The proposed model takes video sequences and extracts temporal and spatial features from them. We then use Inception, a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) for recognizing spatial features. We then use a RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) to train on temporal features. The dataset used is the American Sign Language Dataset.