Sign language is a natural, structured, and complete form of communication to exchange information. Non-verbal communicators, also referred to as hearing impaired and hard of hearing (HI&HH), consider sign language an elemental mode of communication to convey information. As this language is less familiar among a large percentage of the human population, an automatic sign language translator that can act as an interpreter and remove the language barrier is mandatory. The advent of deep learning has resulted in the availability of several sign language translation (SLT) models. However, SLT models are complex, resulting in increased latency in language translation. Furthermore, SLT models consider only hand gestures for further processing, which might lead to the misinterpretation of ambiguous sign language words. In this paper, we propose a lightweight SLT framework, LiST (Lightweight Sign language Translation), that simultaneously considers multiple modalities, such as hand gestures, facial expressions, and hand orientation, from an Indian sign video. The Inception V3 architecture handles the features associated with different signer modalities, resulting in the generation of a feature map, which is processed by a two-layered (long short-term memory) (LSTM) architecture. This sequence helps in sentence-by-sentence recognition and in the translation of sign language into text and audio. The model was tested with continuous Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentences taken from the INCLUDE dataset. The experimental results show that the LiST framework achieved a high translation accuracy of 91.2% and a prediction accuracy of 95.9% while maintaining a low word-level translation error compared to other existing models.

In the area of computer vision, one of the most difficult and challenging tasks is facial emotion recognition. Facial expression recognition (FER) stands out as a pivotal focus within computer vision research, with applications in various domains such as emotion analysis, mental health assessment, and human–computer interaction. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of ensemble methods that combine pre-trained deep learning architectures, specifically AlexNet, ResNet50, and Inception V3, to enhance FER performance on the FER2013 dataset. The results from this study offer insights into the potential advantages of ensemble-based approaches for FER, demonstrating that combining pre-trained architectures can yield superior recognition outcomes.