One-Stage-TFS: Thai One-Stage Fingerspelling Dataset for Fingerspelling Recognition Frameworks

The Thai One-Stage Fingerspelling (One-Stage-TFS) dataset is a comprehensive resource designed to advance research in hand gesture recognition, explicitly focusing on the recognition of Thai sign language. This dataset comprises 7,200 images capturing 15 one-stage consonant gestures performed by undergraduate students from Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University, Thailand. The contributors include both expert students from the Special Education Department with proficiency in Thai sign language and students from other departments without prior sign language experience. Images were collected between July and December 2021 using a DSLR camera, with contributors demonstrating hand gestures against both simple and complex backgrounds. The One-Stage-TFS dataset presents challenges in detecting and recognizing hand gestures, offering opportunities to develop novel end-to-end recognition frameworks. Researchers can utilize this dataset to explore deep learning methods, such as YOLO, EfficientDet, RetinaNet, and Detectron, for hand detection, followed by feature extraction and recognition using techniques like convolutional neural networks, transformers, and adaptive feature fusion networks. The dataset is accessible via the Mendeley Data repository and supports a wide range of applications in computer science, including deep learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition, thereby encouraging further innovation and exploration in these fields.

Bengali Sign Language Recognition through Hand Pose Estimation using Multi-Branch Spatial-Temporal Attention Model

Hand gesture-based sign language recognition (SLR) is one of the most advanced applications of machine learning, and computer vision uses hand gestures. Although, in the past few years, many researchers have widely explored and studied how to address BSL problems, specific unaddressed issues remain, such as skeleton and transformer-based BSL recognition. In addition, the lack of evaluation of the BSL model in various concealed environmental conditions can prove the generalized property of the existing model by facing daily life signs. As a consequence, existing BSL recognition systems provide a limited perspective of their generalisation ability as they are tested on datasets containing few BSL alphabets that have a wide disparity in gestures and are easy to differentiate. To overcome these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal attention-based BSL recognition model considering hand joint skeletons extracted from the sequence of images. The main aim of utilising hand skeleton-based BSL data is to ensure the privacy and low-resolution sequence of images, which need minimum computational cost and low hardware configurations. Our model captures discriminative structural displacements and short-range dependency based on unified joint features projected onto high-dimensional feature space. Specifically, the use of Separable TCN combined with a powerful multi-head spatial-temporal attention architecture generated high-performance accuracy. The extensive experiments with a proposed dataset and two benchmark BSL datasets with a wide range of evaluations, such as intra- and inter-dataset evaluation settings, demonstrated that our proposed models achieve competitive performance with extremely low computational complexity and run faster than existing models.

An Open-Source American Sign Language Fingerspell Recognition and Semantic Pose Retrieval Interface

This paper introduces an open-source interface for American Sign Language fingerspell recognition and semantic pose retrieval, aimed to serve as a stepping stone towards more advanced sign language translation systems. Utilizing a combination of convolutional neural networks and pose estimation models, the interface provides two modular components: a recognition module for translating ASL fingerspelling into spoken English and a production module for converting spoken English into ASL pose sequences. The system is designed to be highly accessible, user-friendly, and capable of functioning in real-time under varying environmental conditions like backgrounds, lighting, skin tones, and hand sizes. We discuss the technical details of the model architecture, application in the wild, as well as potential future enhancements for real-world consumer applications.

Sign Language Recognition Based On Facial Expression and Hand Skeleton

Sign language is a visual language used by the deaf and dumb community to communicate. However, for most recognition methods based on monocular cameras, the recognition accuracy is low and the robustness is poor. Even if the effect is good on some data, it may perform poorly in other data with different interference due to the inability to extract effective features. To solve these problems, we propose a sign language recognition network that integrates skeleton features of hands and facial expression. Among this, we propose a hand skeleton feature extraction based on coordinate transformation to describe the shape of the hand more accurately. Moreover, by incorporating facial expression information, the accuracy and robustness of sign language recognition are finally improved, which was verified on A Dataset for Argentinian Sign Language and SEU's Chinese Sign Language Recognition Database (SEUCSLRD).

BAUST Lipi: A BdSL Dataset with Deep Learning Based Bangla Sign Language Recognition

People commonly communicate in English, Arabic, and Bengali spoken languages through various mediums. However, deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals primarily use body language and sign language to express their needs and achieve independence. Sign language research is burgeoning to enhance communication with the deaf community. While many researchers have made strides in recognizing sign languages such as French, British, Arabic, Turkish, and American, there has been limited research on Bangla sign language (BdSL) with less-than-satisfactory results. One significant barrier has been the lack of a comprehensive Bangla sign language dataset. In our work, we introduced a new BdSL dataset comprising alphabets totaling 18,000 images, with each image being 224x224 pixels in size. Our dataset encompasses 36 Bengali symbols, of which 30 are consonants and the remaining six are vowels. Despite our dataset contribution, many existing systems continue to grapple with achieving high-performance accuracy for BdSL. To address this, we devised a hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, integrating multiple convolutional layers, activation functions, dropout techniques, and LSTM layers. Upon evaluating our hybrid-CNN model with the newly created BdSL dataset, we achieved an accuracy rate of 97.92\%. We are confident that both our BdSL dataset and hybrid CNN model will be recognized as significant milestones in BdSL research.

Scaling up Multimodal Pre-training for Sign Language Understanding

Sign language serves as the primary meaning of communication for the deaf-mute community. Different from spoken language, it commonly conveys information by the collaboration of manual features, i.e., hand gestures and body movements, and non-manual features, i.e., facial expressions and mouth cues. To facilitate communication between the deaf-mute and hearing people, a series of sign language understanding (SLU) tasks have been studied in recent years, including isolated/continuous sign language recognition (ISLR/CSLR), gloss-free sign language translation (GF-SLT) and sign language retrieval (SL-RT). Sign language recognition and translation aims to understand the semantic meaning conveyed by sign languages from gloss-level and sentence-level, respectively. In contrast, SL-RT focuses on retrieving sign videos or corresponding texts from a closed-set under the query-by-example search paradigm. These tasks investigate sign language topics from diverse perspectives and raise challenges in learning effective representation of sign language videos. To advance the development of sign language understanding, exploring a generalized model that is applicable across various SLU tasks is a profound research direction.

Bukva: Russian Sign Language Alphabet

This paper investigates the recognition of the Russian fingerspelling alphabet, also known as the Russian Sign Language (RSL) dactyl. Dactyl is a component of sign languages where distinct hand movements represent individual letters of a written language. This method is used to spell words without specific signs, such as proper nouns or technical terms. The alphabet learning simulator is an essential isolated dactyl recognition application. There is a notable issue of data shortage in isolated dactyl recognition: existing Russian dactyl datasets lack subject heterogeneity, contain insufficient samples, or cover only static signs. We provide Bukva, the first full-fledged open-source video dataset for RSL dactyl recognition. It contains 3,757 videos with more than 101 samples for each RSL alphabet sign, including dynamic ones. We utilized crowdsourcing platforms to increase the subject's heterogeneity, resulting in the participation of 155 deaf and hard-of-hearing experts in the dataset creation. We use a TSM (Temporal Shift Module) block to handle static and dynamic signs effectively, achieving 83.6% top-1 accuracy with a real-time inference with CPU only. The dataset, demo code, and pre-trained models are publicly available.

Hierarchical Windowed Graph Attention Network and a Large Scale Dataset for Isolated Indian Sign Language Recognition

Automatic Sign Language (SL) recognition is an important task in the computer vision community. To build a robust SL recognition system, we need a considerable amount of data which is lacking particularly in Indian sign language (ISL). In this paper, we propose a large-scale isolated ISL dataset and a novel SL recognition model based on skeleton graph structure. The dataset covers 2,002 daily used common words in the deaf community recorded by 20 (10 male and 10 female) deaf adult signers (contains 40033 videos). We propose a SL recognition model namely Hierarchical Windowed Graph Attention Network (HWGAT) by utilizing the human upper body skeleton graph structure. The HWGAT tries to capture distinctive motions by giving attention to different body parts induced by the human skeleton graph structure. The utility of the proposed dataset and the usefulness of our model are evaluated through extensive experiments. We pre-trained the proposed model on the proposed dataset and fine-tuned it across different sign language datasets further boosting the performance of 1.10, 0.46, 0.78, and 6.84 percentage points on INCLUDE, LSA64, AUTSL and WLASL respectively compared to the existing state-of-the-art skeleton-based models.

The American Sign Language Knowledge Graph: Infusing ASL Models with Linguistic Knowledge

Language models for American Sign Language (ASL) could make language technologies substantially more accessible to those who sign. To train models on tasks such as isolated sign recognition (ISR) and ASL-to-English translation, datasets provide annotated video examples of ASL signs. To facilitate the generalizability and explainability of these models, we introduce the American Sign Language Knowledge Graph (ASLKG), compiled from twelve sources of expert linguistic knowledge. We use the ASLKG to train neuro-symbolic models for 3 ASL understanding tasks, achieving accuracies of 91% on ISR, 14% for predicting the semantic features of unseen signs, and 36% for classifying the topic of Youtube-ASL videos.

SCOPE: Sign Language Contextual Processing with Embedding from LLMs

Sign languages, used by around 70 million Deaf individuals globally, are visual languages that convey visual and contextual information. Current methods in vision-based sign language recognition (SLR) and translation (SLT) struggle with dialogue scenes due to limited dataset diversity and the neglect of contextually relevant information. To address these challenges, we introduce SCOPE (Sign language Contextual Processing with Embedding from LLMs), a novel context-aware vision-based SLR and SLT framework. For SLR, we utilize dialogue contexts through a multi-modal encoder to enhance gloss-level recognition. For subsequent SLT, we further fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM) by incorporating prior conversational context. We also contribute a new sign language dataset that contains 72 hours of Chinese sign language videos in contextual dialogues across various scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our SCOPE framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, including Phoenix-2014T, CSL-Daily, and our SCOPE dataset. Moreover, surveys conducted with participants from the Deaf community further validate the robustness and effectiveness of our approach in real-world applications. Both our dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research.