A Low-Cost Speech to Sign Language Converter

A Low-Cost Speech to Sign Language Converter

This paper presents a design of a speech to sign language converter for deaf and hard of hearing people. The device is low-cost, low-power consumption, and it can be able to work entirely offline. The speech recognition is implemented using an open-source API, Pocketsphinx library. In this work, we proposed a context-oriented language model, which measures the similarity between the recognized speech and the predefined speech to decide the output. The output speech is selected from the recommended speech stored in the database, which is the best match to the recognized speech. The proposed context-oriented language model can improve the speech recognition rate by 21% for working entirely offline. A decision module based on determining the similarity between the two texts using Levenshtein distance decides the output sign language. The output sign language corresponding to the recognized speech is generated as a set of sequential images. The speech to sign language converter is deployed on a Raspberry Pi Zero board for low-cost deaf assistive devices.