Pakistan Sign Language: Computer Vision Analysis & Recommendations

Abstract

pk 1. Introduction. It has been discussed above that a noticeable amount of deaf community exists in Pakistan. A detail study has been presented based upon statistical data regarding the deaf people in Pakistan [1][2]. About 3.3 million of Pakistanis are suffering from any kinds of disability in which 0.24 million are impaired of hearing which approximates to 7.4% of overall disables. A very important point is that 55% of the total disabled lie in the age group from 5-29 years. Another statistics provide province wise breakdown and facilities for the deaf provided by Government of Pakistan. The report is jointly prepared from statistics which are taken from the Census Report of Pakistan 1998, State of World Refugees and UNHCR Global Report 2002 available at [3]. Along with that various organizations from Pakistan and across from the world made studies about the amount of hearing impaired in Pakistan and the facilities available to them in [4-7]. This huge quantity of hearing impaired people demands special attention from the community for minimizing communication gap between them and normal individuals of society. The goal of minimizing communication gap among the deaf and between a deaf and normal man can only be reduced using some sort of signs or gestures. There exist various organizations and research groups in Pakistan which are actively working for development of sign or gestures based languages for Pakistani deaf [8, 9]. As per their opinion, these sign/gesture based languages will help them in several ways like performing day to day activities in a casual manner, helping them in education and reducing the gap between a deaf and normal individual. The unavailability of any standard sign language and special deaf teachers are also the major problems in deaf communication and education in Pakistan as discussed by Bushra et al [10]. Apart from that people have also done lots of efforts to aid the deaf community of Pakistan in various ways. The details of various efforts made are available at [11]. They have observed their behaviors, cultures. Their interests, hobbies and extracurricular activities were also been observed. Their response towards marital life

Measuring Effectiveness of Mobile Application in Learning Basic Mathematical Concepts Using Sign Language

“…It also helped to fill the communication gap between hearing and deaf people. In Reference [29], a historical background was presented for the development of PSL. The contribution of different organizations to the development of PSL was also discussed in it.…”

Dataset of Pakistan Sign Language and Automatic Recognition of Hand Configuration of Urdu Alphabet through Machine Learning

“… Data format Raw Analyzed. Parameters for data collection All special hand configuration of the Urdu language alphabets are captured with different orientation and shapes of both hand and fingers [15] Description of data collection. There are 37 letters in the Urdu alphabet.…”

“…There are 37 alphabets in the Urdu language, in our developed dataset total of 40 images for each alphabet are captured with different orientation of hand and fingers through webcam. The alphabets of Urdu sign language are categories baesed on the shape and orientations of both hand and fingers as described in [15] . Total 1480 images are acquired and with these images, 37 classes are created.…”

Repository of Static and Dynamic Signs

“…The accuracy of the system is from 70 -80%. Sumaira has proposed another system using data gloves but this time the use of colored ones is proposed by Sumaira et al She uses fuzzy classifiers to identify gestures [14], [15].…”

“…Sami et al [9] has proposed another technique using computer vision. They have used cross correlation with an accuracy of 75% [14].…”