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A Comprehensive Study on Relative Distances of Hand Landmarks Approach for American Sign Language Gesture

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Abstract

Communication with people with hearing or speaking disabilities is always difficult when there is no knowledge of sign language. The presence of sign language is not enough to communicate smoothly, this process requires another easy medium for communication to make it more efficient, that is, via a digital medium. This paper proposes using Feed-Forward Neural Networks on hand landmarks for real-time sign language identification. The hand landmarks identification was carried out using the MediaPipe Hands library. This approach would make the classification problem efficient by making it faster and requiring less memory. Through this, we aim to bridge the gap between the difficulties that arise during communication between people who do and do not know American Sign Language.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Department of Computer Science Engineering, School of Technology and Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Energy Technology, Pandit Deendayal Energy University for the permission to publish this research.

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All the authors make a substantial contribution to this manuscript. SS, JV, KP and MS participated in drafting the manuscript. SS, JV and MS wrote the main manuscript. All the authors discussed the results and implication on the manuscript at all stages.

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Correspondence to Manan Shah.

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Shah, S., Vaidya, J., Pipariya, K. et al. A Comprehensive Study on Relative Distances of Hand Landmarks Approach for American Sign Language Gesture. Augment Hum Res 9, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41133-024-00064-w

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