Skip to content
dgDavid Gray
All work

Sign Language Interpretation System

Control any smart device with American Sign Language — hand tracking, a gesture classifier and grammar correction, wired together over a client-server link.

Type
Capstone
Year
2021
Built with
Python · TensorFlow · Computer vision · CNN

Smart homes assume you talk to them. My senior capstone team at Missouri State asked what happens if you sign to them instead.

We built a system that lets a user control any smart technology — a lightbulb was our demo — by signing in front of a camera. It has three modules: hand and landmark tracking, gesture classification, and grammar correction. A client-server connection ties them together, which was the point: it proves the software can run on any smart device with a camera rather than one bespoke device.

My part: the classifier

I built, trained and tested the gesture classifier — a convolutional neural network that classifies 14 hand gestures at 98.8% accuracy.

The accuracy number is the headline, but the interesting work was everything underneath it: getting a dataset that reflected real hands in real lighting, deciding what counted as a failure (a wrong light turning on is worse than no light turning on), and keeping inference fast enough that signing felt like control rather than like waiting.

Source code, live demonstrations and the papers are all on GitHub.

Let's talk

Have something hard that has to work?

Contract work, a full-time role, or a problem you want a second opinion on — I read every message and reply to the ones that aren't a template.

Email me

Usually replies within a day or two · St. Louis, Missouri