Brief Introduction

Posted by Vishwa Prabhathiya on Tuesday, August 13, 2019 | No comments

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.

Figure 1: Sinhala Sign Language Alphabet

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).

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.

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.