COR JESU COLLEGE

College of Engineering and Technology

Sacred Heart Avenue, Digos City, Davao del Sur

PROJECT PROPOSAL

Name of Proponents:

Albarico, Kim J.
Sinajon, John Lyndon
Sinoy, John Carlo J.
Proposed Design Title:

Development and evaluation of a sign language decoder for normal people to understand mute and
deaf people using image processing.

Statement of the Problem:

 Mute and deaf people have very limited communication to a normal person that they may wish to
communicate more with them.
 Enable to understand mute and deaf people, a normal person needs to study atleast a year of
American Sign Language subject.
 Existing technologies are still not available in the market today.

Objective of the Study

Develop a communication device to help both mute and deaf community to have a better
communication towards a normal person. Specifically:
 Converts captured movement of a mute or deaf person into a machine encoded device which them
spell out the sign language aloud.
 Determine the performance of the develop system in capturing the movements of a mute or deaf
person.
 Evaluate the effect of the device to the mute or deaf community.

Features of the Study:

 Image processing for capturing the movement.

 An optical recognition program for translation of captured movement.
 Text-to-speech via eSpeak Speech Synthesizer library for the output.
 Light and user friendly.

Programming Language:

 Python
Significance of the Study:

The result of the study will greatly help and improve the way of the mute or deaf community
communicate with normal person.

School community:
Eliminate a huge amount of time to study ASL for a normal person.
Mute or deaf community:
The device can help mute or deaf community to communicate freely to a normal person.
Furthermore, this could increase the capability to work in different fields.

Scopes of the Study:

The design and functions of the study of the system primarily fucoses on the aspect of converting
captured movement into voice.
 The device captured the movement using a camera and enhances the captured movement using
image processing to be easily converted by the optical recognition program.
 The captured movement is to be converted into a machine encoded using optical recognition
algorithm.
 The processed image is to be transformed into a form of audio via text to speech algorithm.
 The system is handy and user friendly, also can be operated in offline mode and can be trained to
add more data about any sign language.

Limitation of the Study:

Since this project is concentrating on the communication for mute/deaf and normal person, this
still has some limitation which need further attention to improve systems capabilities.
 The accuracy and efficiency of the designed system is limited to a mute/deaf to normal person
communication. The movement shall be in a slow pace.
 The language to be used should only be English. With a maximum of 20 words.
 The minimum and maximum distance from the camera is 1 to 2 meters respectively. And the
sentence must start with a raised open palm indicating the start and another raised open palm to
indicate the end.
 The efficacy of the device is primarily based on the mute/deaf student from the special program in
Digos City National High School and University of Mindanao Digos Campus.