Sign language recognition with transformer networks

Sign languages are complex languages. Research into them is ongoing, supported by large video corpora of which only small parts are annotated. Sign language recognition can be used to speed up the annotation process of these corpora, in order to aid research into sign languages and sign language recognition. Previous research has approached sign language recognition in various ways, using feature extraction techniques or end-to-end deep learning. In this work, we apply a combination of feature extraction using OpenPose for human keypoint estimation and end-to-end feature learning with Convolutional Neural Networks. The proven multi-head attention mechanism used in transformers is applied to recognize isolated signs in the Flemish Sign Language corpus. Our proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state of the art of sign language recognition on the Flemish Sign Language corpus: we obtain an accuracy of 74.7% on a vocabulary of 100 classes. Our results will be implemented as a suggestion system for sign language corpus annotation

Automatic recognition of Arabic alphabets sign language using deep learning

Technological advancements are helping people with special needs overcome many communications’ obstacles. Deep learning and computer vision models are innovative leaps nowadays in facilitating unprecedented tasks in human interactions. The Arabic language is always a rich research area. In this paper, different deep learning models were applied to test the accuracy and efficiency obtained in automatic Arabic sign language recognition. In this paper, we provide a novel framework for the automatic detection of Arabic sign language, based on transfer learning applied on popular deep learning models for image processing. Specifically, by training AlexNet, VGGNet and GoogleNet/Inception models, along with testing the efficiency of shallow learning approaches based on support vector machine (SVM) and nearest neighbors algorithms as baselines. As a result, we propose a novel approach for the automatic recognition of Arabic alphabets in sign language based on VGGNet architecture which outperformed the other trained models. The proposed model is set to present promising results in recognizing Arabic sign language with an accuracy score of 97%. The suggested models are tested against a recent fully-labeled dataset of Arabic sign language images. The dataset contains 54,049 images, which is considered the first large and comprehensive real dataset of Arabic sign language to the furthest we know

SLNSpeech: solving extended speech separation problem by the help of sign language

A speech separation task can be roughly divided into audio-only separation and audio-visual separation. In order to make speech separation technology applied in the real scenario of the disabled, this paper presents an extended speech separation problem which refers in particular to sign language assisted speech separation. However, most existing datasets for speech separation are audios and videos which contain audio and/or visual modalities. To address the extended speech separation problem, we introduce a large-scale dataset named Sign Language News Speech (SLNSpeech) dataset in which three modalities of audio, visual, and sign language are coexisted. Then, we design a general deep learning network for the self-supervised learning of three modalities, particularly, using sign language embeddings together with audio or audio-visual information for better solving the speech separation task. Specifically, we use 3D residual convolutional network to extract sign language features and use pretrained VGGNet model to exact visual features. After that, an improved U-Net with skip connections in feature extraction stage is applied for learning the embeddings among the mixed spectrogram transformed from source audios, the sign language features and visual features. Experiments results show that, besides visual modality, sign language modality can also be used alone to supervise speech separation task. Moreover, we also show the effectiveness of sign language assisted speech separation when the visual modality is disturbed. Source code will be released in http://cheertt.top/homepage/Comment: 33 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

Gesture recognition of sign language alphabet with a convolutional neural network using a magnetic positioning system

Gesture recognition is a fundamental step to enable efficient communication for the deaf through the automated translation of sign language. This work proposes the usage of a high-precision magnetic positioning system for 3D positioning and orientation tracking of the fingers and hands palm. The gesture is reconstructed by the MagIK (magnetic and inverse kinematics) method and then processed by a deep learning gesture classification model trained to recognize the gestures associated with the sign language alphabet. Results confirm the limits of vision-based systems and show that the proposed method based on hand skeleton reconstruction has good generalization properties. The proposed system, which combines sensor-based gesture acquisition and deep learning techniques for gesture recognition, provides a 100% classification accuracy, signer independent, after a few hours of training using transfer learning technique on well-known ResNet CNN architecture. The proposed classification model training method can be applied to other sensor-based gesture tracking systems and other applications, regardless of the specific data acquisition technology.</p

Towards automatic sign language corpus annotation using deep learning

Sign classification in sign language corpora is a challenging problem that requires large datasets. Unfortunately, only a small portion of those corpora is labeled. To expedite the annotation process, we propose a gloss suggestion system based on deep learning. We improve upon previous research in three ways. Firstly, we use a proven feature extraction method called OpenPose, rather than learning end-to-end. Secondly, we propose a more suitable and powerful network architecture, based on GRU layers. Finally, we exploit domain and task knowledge to further increase the accuracy. We show that we greatly outperform the previous state of the art on the used dataset. Our method can be used for suggesting a top 5 of annotations given a video fragment that is selected by the corpus annotator. We expect that it will expedite the annotation process to the benefit of sign language translation research