Punjabi University develops announcement system at public places for deaf-Dr Vishal
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in/ Patiala
Research Centre for Technology Development for Differently Abled Persons, Department of Computer Science, Punjabi University Patiala, to the best of the knowledge, being the first such centre in India is continuously working for the welfare of differently abled persons by developing software for making their lives better.
Recently, on 11th March 2020, two mobile applications – one on color detection for blind and one on Child Assessment in Punjabi was released by the Dr. B.S.Ghuman, former Vice Chancellor, Punjabi University Patiala.
Earlier, on 3rd December, 2017, Centre Coordinator, Prof. Vishal Goyal and his research mate Dr. Lalit Goyal had released their Machine translation system for Simple English sentences to Synthetic animated Indian Sign Language(ISL) videos.
Dr. Goyal’s team including their Ph.D.rsearch scholars Deepali Goyal, and M.Phil./M.Tech./MCA research scholars Gurdeep Kaur, Amandeep Kaur are working day and night for extending this system for complex and compound sentences. Krishma who is ISL interpreter has helped a lot in this research work. There were a number of challenges for the implementation of this system such as no pre-defined grammar rules for conversion of complex and compound sentences into ISL, no Signing Gesture Markup Language(SIGML) dictionary, even very less human videos for words to be used for translation system. It was very difficult to work without any funding but it is appreciable that this software has been extending without any financial help from anywhere.
Through this system, any English text can be converted into equivalent ISL animated video on the click of the button. This will help in converting the study material in Indian Sign Language on the click of the button. Dr. Lalit Goyal told that due to various challenges involved in this work, they have tried to make the system accurate but still there may be some issues regarding the conversion of English text to ISL videos. We are still working on this system to get more and more accuracy and we will continue to work so as to develop a perfect translation software.
Another gift to deaf people given by Prof. Vishal Goyal and Dr. Lalit Goyal is announcement system at public places in their own language which is Indian Sign Language(ISL). To their best of the knowledge, this is world’s first such working system. The announcement system in Indian Sign Language for deaf people has been released on World disability day i.e. 03rd December 2020 during the Cultural Evening celebration by Special Olympics Bharat Punjab Chapter. The system has been released by DPS Kharbanda, IAS,Principal Secretary, Ministry of Social Justice and Welfare, Chandigarh and Director, Sports and Youth Affairs, Punjab.
Dr. Goyal used to recall the part of video of “Sugamaya Bharat Abhiyam” in which one deaf person is requesting a woman in his own languge (ISL) to tell what is being announced on the railway station as he cannot hear. Idea striked to their mind and they converted this idea into reality. Dr. Vishal Goyal and Dr. Lalit Goyal created the announcement system not only for Railway stations but also for airports. Now,if Govt. implements their developed announcement system on railway stations and airports, it will be boon for hearing imparied people as they can understand what announcements are being done on these public places. Even, it would be proud forIndia as it would be the only country in the world to implement such software at the railway stations and airports.
Dr. Goyal stated that they faced a lot of challenges in collecting the list of announcements made at railway stations and airports. Further they said that all the collected announcements are divided into two categories- static and dynamic. Static announcements are those which are standard announcements without any change in the announcement. For example, “Take Care of Your Luggage from Thieves”, “Wish you a Happy Journey”, “Donot Accept any Eatable from Stranger” etc. Dynamic announcement are those which have some words like time, platform number etc that may change. These announcements are related to arrival/departure/cancellation of trains etc. Dr. Goyal added that the announcement system would be the first such Make in India software for hearing imparied community.
Dr. Goyal further added that his Ph.D. research scholar Gurdeep Singh is working for developing the translation system for Punjabi text to ISL synthetic animations. His one of the Ph.D. Scholar Annu Rani is developinga system for automatic telecast of news in ISL for the deaf which is unique in itself. One of the Ph.D. research scholar Mr. Rakesh Kumar will be extending the announcements system for hearing impaired people for other public places and will work on accuring more accuracy in the system.
Dr. S.K.Arora, Principal, DAV College, Jalandhar apprecated the efforts done by the research scholars for developing the software which are helpful for differently abled people. Prof. DharamVeer Sharma, Professor and Head, Department of Computer Science and Dr. Gurpreet Singh Josan, Co-Coordinator of this research centre appreciated the research being done by Prof. Vishal Goyal and Prof. Lalit Goyal for this community. On this occasion, Col. Karminder Singh praised the software developed by Dr. Vishal Goyal and his team.
December 10,2020