Improve communication efficiency between hearing-impaired and hearing people - A review

Sign languages are one of the most essential communication skills for hearing-impaired people, yet they are not easy to understand for hearing people and this situation has created communication barriers through many aspects of our society. While recruiting a sign language interpreter for each hearing-impaired people is apparently not feasible, improving the communication effectiveness through up-to-date research work in the field of haptics, motion capture and face recognition can be promising and practical. In this paper, we review a number of previous methods in sign language recognition using different approaches, and identify a few techniques that may improve the effectiveness of the communication pipeline between hearing-impaired and hearing people. These techniques can be fit into a comprehensive communication pipeline and serve as a foundation model for more research work between hearing-impaired and hearing people.