Isolated Sign Language Characters Recognition

 People with normal senses use spoken language to communicate with others. This method cannot be used by those with hearing and speech impaired. These two groups of people will have difficulty when they try to communicate to each other using their own language. Sign language is not easy to learn, as there are various sign languages, and not many tutors are available. This study focuses on the character recognition based on manual alphabet. In general, the characters are divided into letters and numbers. Letters were divided into several groups according to their gestures. Characters recognition was done by comparing the photograph of a character with a gesture dictionary that has been previously developed. The gesture dictionary was created using the normalized Euclidian distance. Character recognition was performed by using the nearest neighbor method and sum of absolute error. Overall, the level of accuracy of the proposed method was 96.36%

Sign Language Glove

Communication between speakers and non-speakers of American Sign Language (ASL) can be problematic, inconvenient, and expensive. This project attempts to bridge the communication gap by designing a portable glove that captures the user’s ASL gestures and outputs the translated text on a smartphone. The glove is equipped with flex sensors, contact sensors, and a gyroscope to measure the flexion of the fingers, the contact between fingers, and the rotation of the hand. The glove’s Arduino UNO microcontroller analyzes the sensor readings to identify the gesture from a library of learned gestures. The Bluetooth module transmits the gesture to a smartphone. Using this device, one day speakers of ASL may be able to communicate with others in an affordable and convenient way

Figures of Radical Absence: Blanks and Voids in Theory, Literature, and the Arts

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of dematerialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence requires more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks than have been available to date. This monograph proposes we think of it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also – and perhaps more productively – as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement

South African sign language dataset development and translation : a glove-based approach

Includes bibliographical references.There has been a definite breakdown of communication between the hearing and the Deaf communities. This communication gap drastically effects many facets of a Deaf person’s life, including education, job opportunities and quality of life. Researchers have turned to technology in order to remedy this issue using Automatic Sign Language. While there has been successful research around the world, this is not possible in South Africa as there is no South African Sign Language (SASL) database available. This research aims to develop a SASL static gesture database using a data glove as the first step towards developing a comprehensive database that encapsulates the entire language. Unfortunately commercial data gloves are expensive and so as part of this research, a low-cost data glove will be developed for the application of Automatic Sign Language Translation. The database and data glove will be used together with Neural Networks to perform gesture classification. This will be done in order to evaluate the gesture data collected for the database. This research project has been broken down into three main sections; data glove development, database creation and gesture classification. The data glove was developed by critically reviewing the relevant literature, testing the sensors and then evaluating the overall glove for repeatability and reliability. The final data glove prototype was constructed and five participants were used to collect 31 different static gestures in three different scenarios, which range from isolated gesture collection to continuous data collection. This data was cleaned and used to train a neural network for the purpose of classification. Several training algorithms were chosen and compared to see which attained the highest classification accuracy. The data glove performed well and achieved results superior to some research and on par with other researchers’ results. The data glove achieved a repeatable angle range of 3.27 degrees resolution with a standard deviation of 1.418 degrees. This result is far below the specified 15 degrees resolution required for the research. The device remained low-cost and was more than $100 cheaper than other custom research data gloves and hundreds of dollars cheaper than commercial data gloves. A database was created using five participants and 1550 type 1 gestures, 465 type 2 gestures and 93 type 3 gestures were collected. The Resilient Back-Propagation and Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithms were considered as the training algorithms for the neural network. The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm had a superior classification accuracy achieving 99.61%, 77.42% and 81.72% accuracy on the type 1, type 2 and type 3 data respectively

Economic Performance and Government Size

We construct a growth model with an explicit government role, where more government resources reduce the optimal level of private consumption and of output per worker. In the empirical analysis, for a panel of 108 countries from 1970-2008, we use different proxies for government size and institutional quality. Our results, consistent with the presented growth model, show a negative effect of the size of government on growth. Similarly, institutional quality has a positive impact on real growth, and government consumption is consistently detrimental to growth. Moreover, the negative effect of government size on growth is stronger the lower institutional quality, and the positive effect of institutional quality on growth increases with smaller governments. The negative effect on growth of the government size variables is more mitigated for Scandinavian legal origins, and stronger at lower levels of civil liberties and political rights. Finally, for the EU, better overall fiscal and expenditure rules improve growth.growth, institutions, fiscal rules, pooled mean group, common correlated effects Classification-C10, C23, H11, H30, O40

On the Security of Software Systems and Services

This work investigates new methods for facing the security issues and threats arising from the composition of software. This task has been carried out through the formal modelling of both the software composition scenarios and the security properties, i.e., policies, to be guaranteed. Our research moves across three different modalities of software composition which are of main interest for some of the most sensitive aspects of the modern information society. They are mobile applications, trust-based composition and service orchestration. Mobile applications are programs designed for being deployable on remote platforms. Basically, they are the main channel for the distribution and commercialisation of software for mobile devices, e.g., smart phones and tablets. Here we study the security threats that affect the application providers and the hosting platforms. In particular, we present a programming framework for the development of applications with a static and dynamic security support. Also, we implemented an enforcement mechanism for applying fine-grained security controls on the execution of possibly malicious applications. In addition to security, trust represents a pragmatic and intuitive way for managing the interactions among systems. Currently, trust is one of the main factors that human beings keep into account when deciding whether to accept a transaction or not. In our work we investigate the possibility of defining a fully integrated environment for security policies and trust including a runtime monitor. Finally, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the leading technology for business applications distributed over a network. The security issues related to the service networks are many and multi-faceted. We mainly deal with the static verification of secure composition plans of web services. Moreover, we introduce the synthesis of dynamic security checks for protecting the services against illegal invocations