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Description

Developing sign language applications for deaf people can be very important, as many of them, being not able to speak a language, are also not able to read or write a spoken language. Ideally, a translation systems would make it possible to communicate with deaf people. Compared to speech commands, hand gestures are advantageous in noisy environments, in situations where speech commands would be disturbing, as well as for communicating quantitative information and spatial relationships.A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication made with a part of the body and used instead of verbal communication (or in combination with it). Most people use gestures and body language in addition to words when they speak. A sign language is a language which uses gestures instead of sound to convey meaning combining hand-shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, facial expressions and lip-patterns. Contrary to popular belief, sign language is not international. As with spoken languages, these vary from region to region. They are not completely based on the spoken language in the country of origin.Sign language is a visual language and consists of 3 major components:finger-spelling: used to spell words letter by letterword level sign vocabulary: used for the majority of communicationnon-manual features: facial expressions and tongue, mouth and body positionThe database contains 35 gestures and consists of 1400 image sequences that contain gestures of 20 different persons recorded under non-uniform daylight lighting conditions. (Formats: mpg,jpg) ( Language Processing and Pattern Recognition / RWTH Aachen University)

Related Papers

• non-manual features: facial expressions and tongue, mouth and body position [link]
• word level sign vocabulary: used for the majority of communication [link]
• finger-spelling: used to spell words letter by letter [link]