Deep Learning Based Recognition of Turkish Sign Language Letters with Unique Data Set

Abstract

With its development, artificial intelligence has formed the basis for many studies aimed at facilitating people's lives. More successful results have been tried to be obtained with the increasing data and developing equipment in these studies. It is seen that these developments in artificial intelligence are reflected in the studies related to sign language conversion.
 In this study, a data set belonging to the letters in the Turkish Sign Language Alphabet was created, and the classification process was carried out with both the deep learning model we created and VGG16, Inceptionv3, Resnet, and Mobilnet models, which are frequently used in image classification. In addition, an open-source data set containing the letters in the American Sign Language Alphabet was organized similar to the data set containing the letters in the Turkish Sign Language Alphabet we created, and Deep Learning models were used to classify the letters in the American Sign Language Alphabet by using this data set. Performance evaluations of the classifications made by Deep Learning Models using both data sets were made.
 With this study, the results obtained from training Deep Learning methods with different data sets were compared. In addition, it is thought that the study will be useful in determining both the data set and the deep learning method to be used for the studies on the recognition of Sign Language Letters.