Recognition of Amharic sign language with Amharic alphabet signs using ANN and SVM

Sign language is a natural language mostly used by persons with hearing- and speech-based impairments to communicate with other people. In these modern times, sign language guides are used to eliminate the communication gap between people having hearing impairments and those with or without hearing impairments; however, they are very limited in number. To solve this challenge, automatic sign language recognition systems are developed to better reduce the communication gap for people with hearing disabilities. This paper presents the development of an automatic Amharic sign language translator which translates Amharic alphabet signs into their corresponding text using digital image processing and machine learning algorithms. The proposed system has four major developmental stages which include preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification. A total number of thirty-four features were extracted from shape, motion and color of hand gestures to represent both the base and derived class of Amharic sign characters. Classification models were built using artificial neural network (ANN) and multi-class support vector machine (SVM). The results show that the recognition system is capable of recognizing the Amharic alphabet signs with an average accuracy of 80.82% and 98.06% using the ANN and SVM classifiers, respectively.