Design Chat Conversation of an Arabic Signs for Deaf-Dumb with

Normal Human and Vice-Versa

: . رضا. جاسم محمد م م

- المستنصرية الجامعة االساسية التربية كلية

الخالصة:

والصم االعمى فمنها شخص الى شخص من تختلف االشخاص في االعاقة حالة ان

مع. المعاقين االشخاص بين تواصل طريقة تطوير على التركيز تم المقترح، هذا في والبكم

. ثغرة لتقليص هو المقترح التصميم من الغرض مرئي برنامج بتصميم وذلك الطبيعيين االشخاص

انشاء تم المقترح التصميم هذا وفي والبكم، الصم واالشخاص الطبيعيين االشخاص بين التواصل

. البرنامج في الطبيعيين االشخاص من واالخر المعاقين طرف من يستخدم احدهما برنامجين،

اختيار يتم ومنه العربية للغة االبجدية لالحرف العالمات تتضمن بيانات قاعدة انشاء تم االول

) بهيئة ) الطبيعي الشخص االخر الطرف الى وارسالها االبجدية من يقابلها ما الى وتحويلها العالمة

الى بالتالي للتحول االول الطرف الى ارساله ويتم المطلوب النص بكتابة يقوم بدوره والذي نص

. المعاق الشخص من مفهوم رمز

Abstract:

The human disabilities are differs from person to person, and there are three

categories of physical disability )Blind, Deaf and dumb, and crippled(. Our proposal solution

is focused on develop a communication approach for the conversion of text and signs as

visual representation. The design is focused with the objective of reducing the

communication gap between normal people and deaf and dump people. The proposal design

has two applications, one used for disabilities, and other used to normal human. There has

been designed two applications, one for deaf-dumb chat box who select the sign)s( and

retrieve from database the meaning in alphabetic form, and send it to other. The other

application its used by normal human whom write the message and send it to first application

on other PC via network and there will be find the database for matched in sign)s( form

)image( then display it.

Keywords: Arabic sings language, ADODC, server and client, TCP/IP

1. Introduction

The dumb people has a privet language has used of normal communication with other

people in the society. It has been observed that they find it really difficult at times to interact

with normal people with their gestures, as only a very few of those are recognized by most

people. Since people with hearing or deaf people can not talk like normal people so they have

to depend on some sort of visual communication in most of the time. Sign language is the

primary means of communication in the deaf and dumb community. As like any other

language it has also got grammar and vocabulary but uses visual modality for exchanging

information [1]. The problem arises when dumb or deaf people try to express themselves to

other people with the help of these sign language grammars. This is because normal people

are usually unaware of these grammars. As a result it has been seen that communication of a

dumb person are only limited within his/her family or the deaf community.

The importance of sign language is emphasized by the growing public approval and

funds for international project. At this age of Technology the demand for a computer based

system is highly demanding for the dumb community[2].

However, this research has been focus on developing an application to help

communication deaf-dumb with normal human, and let deaf-dumb persons to be interesting

in these technologies. The basic objective of this research was to develop a computer based

chat conversation that will enable dumb people significantly to communicate with all other

people using their signs. The idea consisted of designing and building up a network

communication based on TCP/IP and database contains the signs meaning and dataset of

Arabic alphabetic signs.

2. Literature Review

There are not many Researches have been carried out in this particular field, specially

in Arabic sign language. Few researches have been done on this issue though and some of

them are still operational.

One of the previous approaches, a research has been design a system was developed

by M. Rokonuzzaman [3] which analyzes video clips of different sign languages by taken as

input and gives a regular language expression as an audio output. This system then matches

the calculated feature of image sign with the database.

This system could understand expressions and was able to instantly transform the

expression into sign language. The objective of the approach that was chosen to build up this

system was to understand the expression and produce related sign language for deaf or hard

hearing people.

3. Arabic Alphabetic and signs of deaf-dumb

The alphabet is an important series of signs. Some hand signs for letters resemble the

written form of the respective letter. Finger spelling is useful to convey names or to ask

someone the sign for a particular concept. Many people find finger spelling the most

challenging hurdle when learning to sign, as accomplished speakers are very fast finger

spellers. Some of the signs express as an action. Each language has its own signs, in Arabic

the alphabetic signs is shown in figure )1( below.

Figure )1( An Arabic Alphabetic Signs

Network Settings

Chat started by request one side and response other side

Deaf-dumb select signs image (alphabetic)

Convert each sign to its text (alphabet)

Send a text of signs to other side (PC)

Normal human write a message (text)

Convert message (text) to composite of

signs image

Send signs image to deaf-dumb persons

Normal human receives text message

Network Communication

Host 1 (deaf-dumb) side

Host 2 (Normal human) side

4. Proposed Work

The proposed system works in two phases to perform the sign language verification.

First in the deaf-dumb side session it takes the signs which the person has selected and find in

database the description of select sign. The database has designed to include the name of sign

and meaning of the signs. Secondly, once the proposed design is normal human interface

which can be used to write text, and this text will be send to the deaf-dumb side to be

converted to a sign)s( according to matched once in database. To accomplish this job, one of

medium network communication were used which is TCP/IP. The block diagram in figure )2(

gives an overview of the whole proposed design.

Figure )2( Block Diagram of Proposed Design

TCP/IP

Host 1 Host 2

In first phase of the work, the network communication, which is considered as a basic

communication protocol. TCP/IP is a two-layer program. The higher layer, Transmission

Control Protocol, manages the assembling of a message or file into smaller packets that are

transmitted over the network and received by a TCP layer that reassembles the packets into

the original message. The lower layer handles the address part of each packet so that it gets to

the right destination. Each gateway computer on the network checks this address to see where

to forward the message. Even though some packets from the same message are routed

differently than others, they'll be reassembled at the destination. TCP/IP uses the client/server

model of communication in which a computer user )a client( requests and is provided a

service by another computer )a server( in the network. TCP/IP communication is primarily

point-to-point, meaning each communication is from one point )or host computer( in the

network which has considered as deaf-dumb side to another point or host computer as

considered as normal human as shown in figure )3( [4].

Figure )3( Network Communication between two hosts

The second phase of proposed work is focus on deaf-dumb host PC and its process the

alphabetic sign and has a database contains the signs meaning and path of sign image source

as described in table )1( for sample of database in Microsoft Access 2003.

Primary key Sign_alphabetic Image_source

1 ا App.path\signs\ا.jpg

2 ب App.path\signs\ب.jpg

3 ت App.path\signs\ت.jpg

4 ث App.path\signs\ث.jpg

5 ج App.path\signs\ج.jpg

6 ح App.path\signs\ح.jpg

7 خ App.path\signs\خ.jpg

1 Start

Deaf-dumb person selects sign(s) image

for each selected sign

Search database for sign’s character

Send character to Host 2

Does person stop select sign(s)?

End

2

Yes

No

Receive character from Host 2

Search database for sign belong to character

Display sign in picturebox

By using Visual Basic 6.0, has used one of component )ActiveX( to connect database

to retrieve the sign alphabetic and the signs image, the component called )ADODC( which

need to set the database path, provider of type database, and what the table need to retrieve

data from.

Below the figure )4( represent the flow chart of the whole procedures host)1(.

Figure )4( Flow Chart of Host 1 Process )Deaf-Dumb(

When first host )host 1( start selecting an image )sign(, search function will be start looking in database to find a character belong to current selected sign. In same time, this

2

Character has received from host1

Collect each character in string form

Display it in text box

Normal person write message

Does person stop typing message?

End

1

Yes

No

Character sepearation

Send each character to Host 1

character will be sending to host 2, and has own procedure describes as in flow chart illustrated in figure )5( below.

Figure )5( flow chart of host 2 process )normal human(

The host 1, characteristic describes the relationship of cooperating programs in an

deaf-dumb proposed design application. The host 2, component provides a function or service

to one or many client)s( which determined in this proposed as )host 1(, which initiate requests

for such services[5].

Functions suck as a database access are built on the host 1 model. Disabilities persons

have accessing from their computer use a TCP/IP connection, and these persons start to send

a request to a host 2 )normal person(. That host 2, server runs a program which may in turn,

forward the request and retrieve the account information. After acceptation has been returned

its turn serves it back to the host 1, displaying the results to that side and this results represent

as an image of sign.

As it was mentioned above, the primary objective of this research project was to

develop an application design which can act as a translator between the sign language and the

characters dynamically and can make the communication between people with deaf-dumb

and normal people both effective and efficient. Beside this, the designing of the system was

focused on the dynamic association of its language domain, i.e. it can deal with alphabetic

sign languages[6].

5. Expermental Results

There are many tasks has been focused in the design of the proposed work.

The basic task of the training session is to collect sign images and making a database

contains a path of image and character name belong to that sign. The, each image represents a

sign which is considered as a language belongs to deaf-dumb people. This means that the

images are similar to alphabetic character and they represent the same alphabet or expression.

The design form of deaf-dumb )host 1( has set of image represents the alphabetic characters,

and network setting )name, IP address, and IP port(. In addition to that, there is place where

the an image will be appear of converted character to sign that host 2 sending message as

shown in figure )6( below.

Figure )6( Deaf-dumb Form Design

In figure )7(, a normal human interface has received sequence of character from

host1, and collect them in one textbox.

Figure )7( Normal Human Form Design

If the host 2 )normal human( starts writing a message, then this message will be

separated in characters form, and each character will be send to host 1, as shown in figure )8(.

Figure )8( Host 2 write message

Finally, the host 1 )deaf-dumb( received characters one-by-one of wrote message in

host 2. When host 2 received character)s(, will search the database to find an alphabetic sign

character of current received character. Then, display the sign image of character in

picturebox as shown in figure )9(.

Figure )9( Host 1 display alphabetic sign for received alphabetic character

6. Conclusion

Although developing a conversation application for sign language, is an extremely

challenging job, but the importance of the necessity of such a application in the deaf

community is comparatively huge. So the basic objective of this research project was to

develop an efficiently working methodology for sign language using chat concepts for

transceiver the data over TCP/IP network between two hosts, one of them is represent a

design for deaf-dumb whom need set of alphabetic sign characters. Other host is for normal

human who using a textbox to write a message and receives message from host 1.

The successful demonstration of this application supports the idea and proves the

efficiency of the explained methodology. Also, this application )host 1( not needed from

deaf-dumb persons to be write and read, and this will be normally language )signs( for them.

So that, they can come up with an efficient, cost effective, and understanding the deaf

society and help them carry out a normal life style.

References

1. D. Shahriar Hossain Pavel, Tanvir Mustafiz, Asif Iqbal Sarkar, M. Rokonuzzaman,

“Geometrical Model Based Hand Gesture Recognition for Interpreting Bengali Sign

Language Using Computer Vision”, ICCIT, 2003.

2. Kadous, M.W., “Auslan Sign Recognition Using Computers and Gloves”.

3. Adnan Eshaque, Tarek Hamid, Shamima Rahman, M. Rokonuzzaman, "A Novel

Concept of 3D Animation Based 'Intelligent Assistant' for Deaf People: for

Understanding Bengali Expressions", ICCIT, 2002.

4. Margaret Rouse; 2008, "TCP/IP )Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol(";

TeachTarget Article.

5. Choon Hoong Ding, Sarana Nutanong, and Rajkumar Buyya;"Peer-to-Peer Networks

for Content Sharing"; The University of Melbourne, Australia; 2005.

6. Foez M. Rahim, Tamnun E Mursalin, and Nasrin Sultana; "Intelligent Sign Language

Verification System – Using Image Processing, Clustering and Neural Network

Concepts"; American International University-Bangladesh; 2005.