Venugopalan Adithya, Reghunadhan Rajesh
Department of Computer Science, Central University of Kerala, Kasaragod, Kerala 671320 India.
Arab J Sci Eng. 2023;48(2):1349-1362. doi: 10.1007/s13369-022-06843-0. Epub 2022 Apr 22.
The rapid spread of the novel corona virus disease (COVID-19) has disrupted the traditional clinical services all over the world. Hospitals and healthcare centers have taken extreme care to minimize the risk of exposure to the virus by restricting the visitors and relatives of the patients. The dramatic changes happened in the healthcare norms have made it hard for the deaf patients to communicate and receive appropriate care. This paper reports a work on automatic sign language recognition that can mitigate the communication barrier between the deaf patients and the healthcare workers in India. Since hand gestures are the most expressive components of a sign language vocabulary, a novel dataset of dynamic hand gestures for the Indian sign language (ISL) words commonly used for emergency communication by deaf COVID-19 positive patients is proposed. A hybrid model of deep convolutional long short-term memory network has been utilized for the recognition of the proposed hand gestures and achieved an average accuracy of 83.36%. The model performance has been further validated on an alternative ISL dataset as well as a benchmarking hand gesture dataset and obtained average accuracies of and , respectively.
新型冠状病毒病(COVID-19)的迅速传播扰乱了全球传统临床服务。医院和医疗保健中心已采取极其谨慎的措施,通过限制患者的访客和亲属来尽量降低接触病毒的风险。医疗规范发生的巨大变化使聋哑患者难以沟通并获得适当护理。本文报告了一项关于自动手语识别的工作,该工作可以减轻印度聋哑患者与医护人员之间的沟通障碍。由于手势是手语词汇中最具表现力的组成部分,因此提出了一个新的动态手势数据集,用于聋哑COVID-19阳性患者在紧急通信中常用的印度手语(ISL)词汇。一种深度卷积长短期记忆网络的混合模型已被用于识别所提出的手势,并实现了83.36%的平均准确率。该模型性能在另一个ISL数据集以及一个基准手势数据集上得到了进一步验证,分别获得了[具体准确率1]和[具体准确率2]的平均准确率。