Deep Learning Approaches for Age-based Gesture Classification in South Indian Sign Language

Abstract

This study focuses on recognizing and categorizing South Indian Sign Language gestures based on different age groups through transfer learning models. Sign language serves as a natural and expressive communication method for individuals with hearing impairments. This study intends to develop deep transfer learning models, namely Inception-V3, VGG-16, and ResNet-50, to accurately identify and classify double-handed gestures in South Indian languages, like Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. A dataset comprising 30,000 images of double-handed gestures, with 10,000 images for each considered age group (1-7, 8-25, and 25 and above), is utilized to enhance and modify the models for improved classification performance. Amongst the tested models, Inception-V3 achieves the best performance with a test precision of 95.20% and validation accuracy of 92.45%, demonstrating its effectiveness in accurately categorizing images of double-handed gestures into ten different classes.