A Bidirectional Arabic Sign Language Framework Using Deep Learning and Fuzzy Matching Score

Sign language is widely used to facilitate the communication process between deaf people and their surrounding environment. Sign language, like most other languages, is considered a complex language which cannot be mastered easily. Thus, technology can be used as an assistive tool to solve the difficulties and challenges that deaf people face during interactions with society. In this study, an automatic bidirectional translation framework for Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) is designed to assist both deaf and ordinary people to communicate and express themselves easily. Two main modules were intended to translate Arabic sign images into text by utilizing different transfer learning models and to translate the input text into Arabic sign images. A prototype was implemented based on the proposed framework by using several pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning models, including the DenseNet121, ResNet152, MobileNetV2, Xception, InceptionV3, NASNetLarge, VGG19, and VGG16 models. A fuzzy string matching score method, as a novel concept, was employed to translate the input text from ordinary people into appropriate sign language images. The dataset was constructed with specific criteria to obtain 7030 images for 14 classes captured from both deaf and ordinary people locally. The prototype was developed to conduct the experiments on the collected ArSL dataset using the utilized CNN deep learning models. The experimental results were evaluated using standard measurement metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The performance and efficiency of the ArSL prototype were assessed using a test set of an 80:20 splitting procedure, obtaining accuracy results from the highest to the lowest rates with average classification time in seconds for each utilized model, including (VGG16, 98.65%, 72.5), (MobileNetV2, 98.51%, 100.19), (VGG19, 98.22%, 77.16), (DenseNet121, 98.15%, 80.44), (Xception, 96.44%, 72.54), (NASNetLarge, 96.23%, 84.96), (InceptionV3, 94.31%, 76.98), and (ResNet152, 47.23%, 98.51). The fuzzy matching score is mathematically validated by computing the distance between the input and associative dictionary words. The study results showed the prototype’s ability to successfully translate Arabic sign images into Arabic text and vice versa, with the highest accuracy. This study proves the ability to develop a robust and efficient real-time bidirectional ArSL translation system using deep learning models and the fuzzy string matching score method.