Unveiling the Silent Language: A Comprehensive Survey of Sign Language Communication

Abstract

Sign language is a form of communication utilized by people with speech and hearing impairments all around the world. The deaf community in India uses Indian Sign Language (ISL) as their primary language. With a large and diverse population present and a higher prevalence of the deaf community in India, there is a need for establishing communication between people using ISL and those who don't. This work discusses the different existing spoken language to ISL translation systems, focusing on both foreign spoken languages such as English and Indian spoken languages. This work covers the fundamentals of ISL, commonly used visual avatar systems, and a study of the translation systems for various spoken languages to understand their approaches, methodologies, and performance. The survey concludes with a discussion of the features and limitations of these systems and points out the future research directions in this area. Such studies would be of great assistance to researchers who are interested in developing new tools and technologies in this area.