Give Me a Sign

What’s your sign? Heck if I know, but TARANG can tell you in no time. That just leaves the question: What is TARANG? And that one, I can answer.

TARANG is an automatic, real-time sign language translation device developed by redditor curiousrohan. It was built to have a friendly appearance, something more like a pet than an electronic gadget. Truth be told, it is the strangest looking pet I have ever seen, but the eyes blinking on the little OLED screen do give TARANG some personality.

To use the system, the person communicating in sign language simply stands behind the device and does what they normally do. The listener stands on the other side, where the OLED screen is located. As signs are recognized, their meaning is displayed on the screen.

This magic is accomplished by pointing a camera at the speaker and capturing a steady stream of images. MediaPipe is then leveraged for hand tracking, and hand positions are associated with known signs.

You wouldn’t want all of your private conversations being sent to the cloud for processing, just waiting for the next big data breach (after which you would naturally find out that the service provider wasn’t actually deleting old conversations like they said they were). So to avoid using this type of architecture, curiousrohan built TARANG around a Raspberry Pi 5. These little single-board computers pack enough punch to do all of the processing locally.

Details on the build are still light at this point, but curiousrohan notes that all of the source code will be posted to GitHub in the next couple weeks, so stay tuned for more information.