'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
Structured hand gestures that incorporate visual
motions and signs are used in sign language. Sign language is
a valuable means of daily communication for individuals who
are deaf or have speech impairments, but it is still rare among
hearing people, and fewer are capable of understand it. Within
the academic context, parents and teachers play a crucial role
in supporting deaf students from childhood by facilitating their
learning of sign language. In the last years, among all the teaching
tools useful for learning sign language, the use of Virtual Reality
(VR) has increased, as it has been demonstrated to improve
retention, memory and attention during the learning process. The
ISENSE project has been created to assist students with deafness
during their academic life by proposing different technological
tools for teaching sign language to the hearing community in the
academic context. As part of the ISENSE project, this work
aims to develop an application for Spanish and Italian sign
language recognition that exploits the VR environment to quickly
and easily create a comprehensive database of signs and an
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based software to accurately classify
and recognize static and dynamic signs: from letters to sentences