5410130021 นายกฤตศิลป์ ศิลานนท์ Vision-based Thai Sign Language Recognition, ปีการศึกษา 2554
Communication is essential for human living in globalization world that information exchanges at all the time. There are several forms of communication among people. The common way of communication is spoken language. However, there are deaf or non-vocal persons that using sign language for communication. The sign language is a language which uses visually sign transmitted patterns by simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express a speaker’s meaning. The Sign language system can be differentiated into 5 categories as follows: 1) Pantomimic signs are the signing of hand-shape, hand orientations, and hand movements simultaneously to convey meanings of that signing. 2) Imitative signs are similar to Pantomimic signs. However, by using the imitative signs, the signers intend to convey particular meanings instead of the overall meanings. For example, the signer pronounces the signing of hand holding steering wheel of the car to convey the meaning of both “car” and “car driving”. 3) Metonymic signs are similar to Imitative signs but how the sign was presented is the result of reference. For example, the sign of saluting refers to “soldier”. 4) Indicative signs are represented by point the finger to the reference object in which that objects does not need its presence at that moment of signing. For example, to represent themselves, the signers just simply point their index finger toward their chest. 5) Initialized signs are done by finger-spelling corresponding to the letter of the word in a spoken/written language. Generally, the sign language is usually difficult to recognize especially for normal people. For this reason, the problem of recognize a sign language have been a popular research field. There are several approaches that have been proposed in this research area, but this research focus on a finger-spelling basic signs of Thai Sign Language (TSL) which is used to spell out names, places, technical word or anything else there is not a sign and can sometimes be a source of new signs. The use of finger-spelling was taken as evidence that sign languages were simplified versions of oral languages. This will improve a quality of life for deaf or non-vocal persons and decrease the communication gap between them and normal people.