Communication is the method of conveying ideas between each
other. People use different languages. Sign languages are being used by dumb
and deaf people who are unable to communicate using usual language which are
being used by ordinary people. Such sign languages include Sinhala Sign
Language (shown in Figure 1),
American Sign Language (shown in Figure 2)
and etc.
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| Figure 1: Sinhala Sign Language Alphabet |
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| Figure 2: American Sign Language Alphabet |
Due to the lack of knowledge of using sign languages, the
ordinary people are getting difficulties to understand the sign languages.
Therefore, they are tending to ignore dumb and deaf people. Hence this group of
people likely to being isolated from the society.
In order to bring forward this isolated group in the
society, new methods and techniques are being experimented by the scientist to
make better and effective communication between ordinary people and this group.
In the Sri Lankan context, few number of experiments have
done to find solutions for the same problem.
In Sri Lanka, the estimated population in 2017 is 21.44
million. There are over three hundred thousand (300,000+) deaf people in Sri
Lanka according to Sri Lanka Federation of the deaf. Further, the survey of
World Health Organization has revealed that approximately 9% of the population
in Sri Lanka is hearing impaired.
As a multinational country, the people in Sri Lanka use
different languages to communicate. Among the languages, Sinhala is the native
language used by 74.9% of the total population of Sri Lanka. The written Sinhala has 9
cases, 3 tenses with masculine, feminine and question forms. In contrast, Sinhala
Sign Language has 60 finger-spelling signs representing 60 characters of modern
Sinhala alphabet. Further it does not have sufficient vocabulary that are
supported to different word forms in Sinhala. Hence, it may have a single sign
gesture to represent a word or phrase (shown in Figure 3).
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| Figure 3: One sign for a word or more |
Sinhala Sign Language uses ‘phonetic pronunciation’ of a
word or a letter to construct a sign word or a letter. For example, phonetic
pronunciation of the letter “ක”
in Sinhala is “ක්, අ”, which can be finger-spelled
using two finger-spelling signs as shown in Figure 4.
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| Figure 4: Form of a letter in Sinhala sign language |
By targeting group of dumb and deaf people who
communicate using Sinhala sign language, the main goal of this project is to
develop a real-time Sinhala sign language translator to make an effective
communication between ordinary Sinhalese and them. Proposed system is a
bidirectional system which can convert Sinhala sign language to Sinhala text
and Sinhala speech to Sinhala sign language.
