Indian Sign Language Translator

Near-real-time Indian Sign Language translation with face activation, hand detection, and sequence recognition.

Why I Built This

I wanted to build something with direct accessibility impact, not just a model that performs well on curated samples. This project focused on Indian Sign Language translation that could handle realistic background and lighting variation. The motivation was to contribute a practical communication aid while learning robust vision pipeline design end to end.

Pipeline

  • Face detection as the activation mechanism.
  • YOLO-v3-based hand detection for frame filtering and crop generation.
  • HSV + YCbCr skin segmentation to reduce background noise.
  • Transfer-learned SqueezeNet classifier over a cleaned ISL dataset.

Outcome

A near-real-time translator prototype designed for background and illumination robustness, built as a full final-year capstone with an open-source codebase.