Digital technology has enhanced our lives in more ways than we can count. In the entertainment world and healthcare, emerging technologies have evolved to be a critical part of our everyday lives – both at home and at work. Tech Crunch brought this interesting news to us in their article, “This hand-tracking algorithm could lead to sign language recognition.”
Millions of people communicate using sign language. Recently a new advance in real-time hand tracking from Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) labs has the potential to monumentally impact their lives in a very personal way.
The new technique uses a few clever shortcuts and, of course, the increasing efficiency of machine learning systems to produce, in real time, a highly accurate map of the hand and all its fingers, using only a smartphone and its camera.
Translating is difficult work, the more so the further two languages are from one another. But sign language is uniquely difficult because it is fundamentally different from spoken and written languages. All the same, innovations like this are working hard to make accurate, real-time machine translation of sign language a reality.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
