Recognition of Indian Sign Language (ISL) Using Deep Learning Model

An efficient sign language recognition system (SLRS) can recognize the gestures of sign language to ease the communication between the signer and non-signer community. In this paper, a computer-vision based SLRS using a deep learning technique has been proposed. This study has primary three contributions: first, a large dataset of Indian sign language (ISL) has been created using 65 different users in an uncontrolled environment. Second, the intra-class variance in dataset has been increased using augmentation to improve the generalization ability of the proposed work. Three additional copies for each training image are generated in this paper, by using three different affine transformations. Third, a novel and robust model using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) have been proposed for the feature extraction and classification of ISL gestures. The performance of this method is evaluated on a self-collected ISL dataset and publicly available dataset of ASL. For this total of three datasets have been used and the achieved accuracy is 92.43, 88.01, and 99.52%. The efficiency of this method has been also evaluated in terms of precision, recall, f-score, and time consumed by the system. The results indicate that the proposed method shows encouraging performance compared with existing work.