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SignSpeaker: A Real-time, High-Precision SmartWatch-based Sign Language Translator

Published: 05 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Sign language is a natural and fully-formed communication method for deaf or hearing-impaired people. Unfortunately, most of the state-of-the-art sign recognition technologies are limited by either high energy consumption or expensive device costs and have a difficult time providing a real-time service in a daily-life environment. Inspired by previous works on motion detection with wearable devices, we propose Sign Speaker - a real-time, robust, and user-friendly American sign language recognition (ASLR) system with affordable and portable commodity mobile devices. SignSpeaker is deployed on a smartwatch along with a smartphone; the smartwatch collects the sign signals and the smartphone outputs translation through an inbuilt loudspeaker. We implement a prototype system and run a series of experiments that demonstrate the promising performance of our system. For example, the average translation time is approximately $1.1$ seconds for a sentence with eleven words. The average detection ratio and reliability of sign recognition are 99.2% and 99.5%, respectively. The average word error rate of continuous sentence recognition is 1.04% on average.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiCom '19: The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
August 2019
1017 pages
ISBN:9781450361699
DOI:10.1145/3300061
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 August 2019

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  1. applications of machine learning
  2. mobile computing

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  • (2024)Exploring the Impact of the NULL Class on In-the-Wild Human Activity RecognitionSensors10.3390/s2412389824:12(3898)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2024
  • (2024)American Sign Language Recognition and Translation Using Perception Neuron Wearable Inertial Motion Capture SystemSensors10.3390/s2402045324:2(453)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Efficient Deep Learning Infrastructures for Embedded Computing Systems: A Comprehensive Survey and Future EnvisionACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/370172824:1(1-100)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
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