🤟 Real-time Sign Language Translator
This project is a real-time American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet translator built using Python. The application leverages a custom-trained deep learning model to recognize hand gestures via a webcam and translates them into text on the screen instantly. This project demonstrates a complete end-to-end pipeline for a computer vision task, from data collection and feature extraction to model training and real-time inference.
🎥 Live Demo
[**Action Required:** Create a short GIF of the application running and place it here. A GIF is the best way to showcase this project!]
*A great tool for this is [ScreenToGif](https://www.screentogif.com/) (for Windows).*
✨ Key Features
* **🤘 Real-time Gesture Recognition:** Translates sign language gestures from a live webcam feed.
* **🦾 Custom Deep Learning Model:** Utilizes a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model trained from scratch using TensorFlow/Keras.
* **🚀 High-Performance Feature Extraction:** Employs Google's **MediaPipe** library to extract robust hand landmarks, making the model lightweight and independent of the background.
* ** modular Pipeline:** The project is structured into clear, reusable phases: data collection, feature extraction, model training, and real-time deployment.
🛠️ Tech Stack
* **Core:** Python 3.10+
* **Deep Learning:** TensorFlow, Keras
* **Computer Vision:** OpenCV, MediaPipe
* **Data Handling:** NumPy, Scikit-learn, Pandas
* **Development:** Jupyter Notebook
📂 Project Pipeline
The project was developed in four distinct phases:
1. **Data Collection:** A custom script (notebooks/01-Data\_Collection.ipynb) was created to capture image sequences for each sign language gesture using a webcam. (For this repo, a pre-existing dataset from Kaggle was used to ensure reproducibility).
2. **Feature Extraction:** Instead of using raw pixels, **MediaPipe Holistic** was used to extract 126 key data points (landmarks) from the hands in each image. This creates a lightweight, numerical representation of each gesture.
3. **Model Training:** A neural network was built and trained on the extracted landmarks. The model learns to map the numerical patterns of the landmarks to their corresponding alphabet labels.
4. **Real-time Inference:** The trained model (models/asl\_model.h5) is loaded into a final script (src/realtime\_translator.py) that captures webcam frames, processes them through the same MediaPipe pipeline, and feeds the landmarks to the model for live prediction.
🚀 Setup and Installation
#### 1. Clone the Repository
git clone \[YOUR\_GITHUB\_REPOSITORY\_URL]
cd Sign\_Language\_Translator
"# Sign_Language_Translator"
"# Sign_Language_Translator_pro"