Bangla sign language recognition using concatenated BdSL network

Sign language is the only medium of communication for the hearing impaired and the deaf and dumb community. Communication with the general mass is thus always a challenge for this minority group. Especially in Bangla sign language (BdSL), there are 38 alphabets with some having nearly identical symbols. As a result, in BdSL recognition, the posture of hand is an important factor in addition to visual features extracted from traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In this paper, a novel architecture "Concatenated BdSL Network" is proposed which consists of a CNN based image network and a pose estimation network. While the image network gets the visual features, the relative positions of hand keypoints are taken by the pose estimation network to obtain the additional features to deal with the complexity of the BdSL symbols. A score of 91.51% was achieved by this novel approach in test set and the effectiveness of the additional pose estimation network is suggested by the experimental results.