Sign language is the natural medium for the deaf community. There are approximately 155,000 people with hearing impairments in Hong Kong, consisting of 2.2% of the total population. However, according to the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, only 56 qualified sign language interpreters can be found on the Hong Kong Sign Language Interpreter Names list. To help address this problem, our students developed an interactive game, “AI Sign Language Game Project”, to encourage more people to learn basic sign language. The project may help to promote mutual understanding between the hearing and hearing-impaired communities.
Jointly developed by the Engineering Discipline, the Health and Life Sciences Discipline and the VTC STEM Education Centre, the game uses computer vision technology to extract 130 real-time key points from images of human body movements, hand gestures and facial expressions. The AI system then compares the images captured with pre-trained models for image classification and validation of model accuracy.
The AI Sign Language Game Project was showcased at the VTC International HealthTech Forum 2021.