Sign language is an essential communication system for deaf people, which plays a crucial role in promoting inclusion in modern society and which, like other tools for people with some other type of disability, deserves visibility so that they are worked on and become public knowledge.
By recognizing and supporting sign language, a path is opened towards equality and the full participation of all people in various areas, and fostering its use in daily life, as well as in companies and organizations, not only guarantees access to information and communication, but also enriches entities, fosters team collaboration, and strengthens the most human values of the corporation.
In this post, we will see how technology, and specifically Sign4all, the first sign language translator app, are setting true milestones for inclusion.
It is incredible how technology is activating change in all facets of our lives and developing improvements for social aspects that, perhaps, were not so visible to the majority of society, such as the importance of sign language.
Currently, in Spain, 98% of deaf-mute people use regulated sign language, which means that, to communicate with them, we should all learn it just as we learn English and another language. In fact, why learn a foreign language and not another that gives us the possibility of communicating with people who are much closer?
Sign4all, the first sign language translator app, capable of recognizing and interpreting the Spanish sign language alphabet in real-time, was born from the Robotics and Three-Dimensional Vision Group of the University of Alicante with the aim of breaking down barriers between deaf and hearing people.
Thanks to deep learning technology and different computer vision techniques, this app captures and interprets signs to translate them into the majority language.
For us to understand how the application works to translate sign language, its mechanism consists of capturing the person and extracting every detail of the movements they make with the skeleton of their arms and hands. It then codes the left part of the body in blue and the right part in red, maintaining the user's anonymity at all times.
Of course, we cannot forget that effective communication is always bidirectional, so the application also works in reverse through a virtual avatar that performs the signs when the hearing person types the words in Spanish.
And the best part are two things: first: sig4all can translate the conversation in real-time; and second: thanks to the low cost of the tool, it is accessible to all people who need it when they cannot be accompanied by an interpreter.
As we have mentioned, the first sign language translator app is based on deep learning technology, but would you be able to say what this consists of? Pay attention!
Deep learning is an artificial intelligence technique inspired by how the human brain works to learn and recognize patterns.
For example: imagine you are teaching a computer to identify cats in photos.
Instead of telling it directly how to recognize a cat, you repeatedly give it many photos of cats so that it assimilates their image. Thus, the system begins to look for common patterns, such as shapes, colors, and textures, so that, as it sees more and more photos of cats, it adjusts its internal connections (called "artificial neurons" or "nodes") and improves its ability to identify cats by itself.
Similar to a child's learning process, in which increasingly complex concepts are coupled and more neural connections are generated, deep learning uses layers of these "artificial neurons" to process information at increasingly deeper levels. Each layer detects specific characteristics and passes that information to the next layer to perform more complete and detailed analyses.
When the system has seen enough cats, it is capable of generalizing and recognizing them in images it has never seen before, which is because it has learned to detect the essential characteristics that define the animal.
Returning to Sign4all, which is the topic at hand, the mechanism would work the same way: the more signs it sees and words it hears, the more capable it will be of acting as a translator/interpreter between deaf and hearing people.
Now, the developers of this sign translator application are working on a collaborative project with the Spanish Language and Signed Languages Research Group (Griles) of the University of Vigo, who are enriching the database to work with Sig4all in the near future.
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