Toward Deployable Bangla Sign Language Recognition with Expert-Validated Data and a Lightweight Attention-Based Model

Deaf and hard-of-hearing people in Bangladesh communicate mainly through Bangla Sign Language (BdSL). Automatic BdSL recognition on personal devices could widen access to education and services. Existing systems use controlled-setting datasets without expert verification and heavyweight pretrained backbones unsuited to on-device use. We introduce RSBdSL38, 10,874 expert-validated images spanning all 38 BdSL hand signs, representing the 51 letters of the Bangla alphabet, recorded from real signers at three special-needs schools across Bangladesh. We propose a lightweight attention based convolutional network of 298,470 parameters, built from grouped bottleneck residual blocks, channel and spatial attention, a multi-scale depthwise hand-feature block, dual pooling, and Swish activations. Trained from scratch, it attains 96.37% accuracy (95.72% +- 0.54% over five seeds), within 1.08 percentage points of the best of nine ImageNet-pretrained efficient architectures under an identical protocol, using 8.5 to 68x fewer parameters and 1.3 to 21.7x fewer MACs. Retrained, it reaches 92.95 to 98.33% on six public BdSL benchmarks, 97.04% on a merged corpus, and 76.25% zero-shot on BdSL-38. Removing any architectural stage costs 7.61 to 89.30 points, against at most 3.17 for the training recipe. Grad-CAM with deletion-insertion and weight-randomization checks confirms that predictions follow the signing hand. A signer-independent split holding out 6 of 36 signers yields 85.18%. Quantized to 0.48 MB, it runs at 3.98 ms per image within a 15.5 MB footprint on a commodity smartphone. Together, RSBdSL38 and our from-scratch model turn benchmark accuracy into deployable accessibility at a fraction of pretrained-backbone cost; dataset, code, and models are released.