A Communication Platform Between Bangla and Sign Language

Abstract

Hearing and speaking impairments are very crippling handicaps for human beings. People affected by such impairments often use sign language to communicate, which is very different from spoken and written language, often leading to difficulties in communication when a translation medium is not readily available. This leads to heavy struggle in the daily lives of the affected people, especially in Bangladesh. A simple, accurate and portable translation medium is necessary to address this problem, which would allow two-way communication between a normal person and an impaired person. Speech recognition and conversion to sign language is a key part of such a medium, especially since Bangla is a rather challenging language to work with. In this paper, we have described the development of a smartphone application, which provides a two-way communication platform, which employs a speech-to-sign language system and a text-to-speech system. Testing of the application shows satisfactory results, with an average accuracy of 84.71% in various test environments.