Understanding Sign Language Recognition: An Overview

Communication is only the way which is used by human to express their needs, feelings and thoughts to people mostly by speech. But this world also has the people with some disability like deaf and dumb people. For these people communication is not possible by speech. The only language which is used by deaf and dumb people to communicate with each other is Sign Language. Sign Language is completely different from generally spoken languages, it has its own grammar. Different body parts are involved in sign language but the important parameters are hand gestures, body movement and also facial expression. Many researches have been done in sign language recognition. But still Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is the most challenging area for practitioners and researchers, because sign language is not an international language. For e.g., Indian Sign Language is differed from Ethiopian Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, American Sign Language and other country’s sign language. The SLR is mostly required because of its ability to remove the communication barrier for deaf and dumb people. This review paper contains various techniques of AI (Artificial Intelligence) used for SLR for human understanding that have employed in recent past. The main approaches are i) Vision based ii) Glove based. In vision-based approach one or more camera is used to capture the image sequence, and then image processing is used to recognize the signs. In glove-based approach instrumental gloves with sensor is used to track the hand movement