Sign Language and Emotion Understanding

Abstract

Sign language is the primary form of communication of the deaf community. It is one of the only channels of communication between the hearing impaired community and the rest of society. While there are many existing SLR systems that focus on the recognition of manual gestures, few consider the non manual components of sign language, such as facial expressions. The role of these non manual features are comparable to pitch, intonation and nuances that are observed in spoken language. Our prototype combines manual SLR with emotion recognition to form a singular system that can recognise both facial expressions and sign language gestures.