Design and Development of Tamil Sign Alphabets using Image Processing with Right Hand Palm to Aid Deaf-Dumb People

Abstract

Hand recognition is a recent active area of research in the computer vision for the purpose of Human - Computer Interaction. This paper mainly concentrates on Tamil sign alphabets (TSL) into speech which could be helpful for deaf-dumb people. In this paper, a set of 32 (2⁵) combinations of binary number sign images are introduced to propose a system to recognize Tamil sign alphabets. These Tamil alphabets have 12 vowels, 18 consonants, and one Aayutha Ezhuthu. The proposed system is based on four main stages: Pre-processing method, Training phase, Sign detection, and Conversion of Binary to voice. The binary sign images are loaded at a run time or static as 310 images which are taken ten times in different distances at the same position. The Ave fingertip positions represent (‘1’ or ‘0’) and are identified by using image processing techniques with proposed right hand palm angular-based analysis. Then, the binary values are assigned to the corresponding Tamil letters and voice. The experiments were performed with ten different signer palms and the results demonstrated that the system could successfully recognize Tamil sign alphabets with better accuracy with 99.35% of static images and 98.36% of dynamic images (runtime).

Keywords:

• Feature extraction point
• Human-computer interaction
• Image processing technique
• Pattern recognition
• Sign detection
• Tamil sign alphabet recognition system

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P. Subha Rajam

P. Subha Rajam, M.E., is the Assistant Professor, J.J. College of Engineering and Technology. She received her B.E. (CSE) degree in Government College of Engineering, Tirunelveli from the Madurai Kamaraj University, in 1992 and her M.E. (CSE) degree in J.J. College of Engineering, Tiruchirappalli affiliated to Anna University – Chennai, in 2006 respectively. At present she is doing her Ph.D., degree under Anna University of Technology Tiruchirappalli, in the area of Image Processing, under the guidance of Dr. G. Balakrishnan, co-author of this paper. She has published 4 research papers in International Conferences and 3 research papers in International Journal. She has 16 years of teaching experience in J.J. College of Engineering and Technology, Tiruchirappalli. E-mail: [email protected]

G. Balakrishnan

G. Balakrishnan, M.E., Ph.D., is the Director, Indra Ganesan College of Engineering. He completed his B.E.,(CSE) from Bharathidasan University, Trichy, M.E.,(CSE) from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore and Ph.D.(Image Processing) from University Malaysia Sabah, Malaysia. He has more than ten years of Academic and Industrial experience. He has more than 50 publications in International Journals and Conferences. His area of specialization is image processing. He is the advisory council member for several international and national conferences. He has won silver medals for his research contribution in various national, international research competitions. E-mail: [email protected]