Sign Language Recognition is a challenging research domain. It has recently seen several advancements with the increased availability of data. In this paper, we introduce the BosphorusSign22k, a publicly available large scale sign language dataset aimed at computer vision, video recognition and deep learning research communities. The primary objective of this dataset is to serve as a new benchmark in Turkish Sign Language Recognition for its vast lexicon, the high number of repetitions by native signers, high recording quality, and the unique syntactic properties of the signs it encompasses. We also provide state-of-the-art human pose estimates to encourage other tasks such as Sign Language Production. We survey other publicly available datasets and expand on how BosphorusSign22k can contribute to future research that is being made possible through the widespread availability of similar Sign Language resources. We have conducted extensive experiments and present baseline results to underpin future research on our dataset.
Information surrounds people in modern life. Text is a very efficient type of information that people use for communication for centuries. However, automated text-in-the-wild recognition remains a challenging problem. The major limitation for a DL system is the lack of training data. For the competitive performance, training set must contain many samples that replicate the real-world cases. While there are many high-quality datasets for English text recognition; there are no available datasets for Russian language. In this paper, we present a large-scale human-labeled dataset for Russian text …
This paper tackles the problem of zero-shot sign language recognition (ZSSLR), where the goal is to leverage models learned over the seen sign classes to recognize the instances of unseen sign classes. In this context, readily available textual sign descriptions and attributes collected from sign language dictionaries are utilized as semantic class representations for knowledge transfer. For this novel problem setup, we introduce three benchmark datasets with their accompanying textual and attribute descriptions to analyze the problem in detail. Our proposed approach builds spatiotemporal mode…
Hacettepe University（哈斯特帕大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
We introduce the problem of zero-shot sign language recognition (ZSSLR), where the goal is to leverage models learned over the seen sign class examples to recognize the instances of unseen signs. To this end, we propose to utilize the readily available descriptions in sign language dictionaries as an intermediate-level semantic representation for knowledge transfer. We introduce a new benchmark dataset called ASL-Text that consists of 250 sign language classes and their accompanying textual descriptions. Compared to the ZSL datasets in other domains (such as object recognition), our dataset co…
In this letter, we contribute a multi-language handwritten digit recognition dataset named MNIST-MIX, which is the largest dataset of the same type in terms of both languages and data samples. With the same data format with MNIST, MNIST-MIX can be seamlessly applied in existing studies for handwritten digit recognition. By introducing digits from 10 different languages, MNIST-MIX becomes a more challenging dataset and its imbalanced classification requires a better design of models. We also present the results of applying a LeNet model which is pre-trained on MNIST as the baseline.
The recognition of sign language is a challenging task with an important role in society to facilitate the communication of deaf persons. We propose a new approach of Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network to sign language recognition based on the human skeletal movements. The method uses graphs to capture the signs dynamics in two dimensions, spatial and temporal, considering the complex aspects of the language. Additionally, we present a new dataset of human skeletons for sign language based on ASLLVD to contribute to future related studies.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory（麻省理工学院林肯实验室）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Learned feature representations and sub-phoneme posteriors from Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been used separately to produce significant performance gains for speaker and language recognition tasks. In this work we show how these gains are possible using a single DNN for both speaker and language recognition. The unified DNN approach is shown to yield substantial performance improvements on the the 2013 Domain Adaptation Challenge speaker recognition task (55% reduction in EER for the out-of-domain condition) and on the NIST 2011 Language Recognition Evaluation (48% reduction in EER for th…
Voice-controlled personal and home assistants (such as the Amazon Echo and Apple Siri) are becoming increasingly popular for a variety of applications. However, the benefits of these technologies are not readily accessible to Deaf or Hard-ofHearing (DHH) users. The objective of this study is to develop and evaluate a sign recognition system using multiple modalities that can be used by DHH signers to interact with voice-controlled devices. With the advancement of depth sensors, skeletal data is used for applications like video analysis and activity recognition. Despite having similarity with t…
AI technologies for Natural Languages have made tremendous progress recently. However, commensurate progress has not been made on Sign Languages, in particular, in recognizing signs as individual words or as complete sentences. We introduce OpenHands, a library where we take four key ideas from the NLP community for low-resource languages and apply them to sign languages for word-level recognition. First, we propose using pose extracted through pretrained models as the standard modality of data to reduce training time and enable efficient inference, and we release standardized pose datasets fo…
Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is an essential yet challenging task since sign language is performed with the fast and complex movement of hand gestures, body posture, and even facial expressions. %Skeleton Aware Multi-modal Sign Language Recognition In this work, we focused on investigating two questions: how fine-tuning on datasets from other sign languages helps improve sign recognition quality, and whether sign recognition is possible in real-time without using GPU. Three different languages datasets (American sign language WLASL, Turkish - AUTSL, Russian - RSL) have been used to validate…
Sign Language Recognition is one of the most growing fields of research today. Many new techniques have been developed recently in these fields. Here in this paper, we have proposed a system using Eigen value weighted Euclidean distance as a classification technique for recognition of various Sign Languages of India. The system comprises of four parts: Skin Filtering, Hand Cropping, Feature Extraction and Classification. Twenty four signs were considered in this paper, each having ten samples, thus a total of two hundred forty images was considered for which recognition rate obtained was 97 pe…
Information Technologies Institute（信息技术研究所）；Centre for Research Technology Hellas（希腊研究与技术中心）；University of Patras（帕特拉斯大学）
In this paper, a comparative experimental assessment of computer vision-based methods for sign language recognition is conducted. By implementing the most recent deep neural network methods in this field, a thorough evaluation on multiple publicly available datasets is performed. The aim of the present study is to provide insights on sign language recognition, focusing on mapping non-segmented video streams to glosses. For this task, two new sequence training criteria, known from the fields of speech and scene text recognition, are introduced. Furthermore, a plethora of pretraining schemes is …
Normandie University（诺曼底大学）；University of Rouen（鲁昂大学）
We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time. While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongl…
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV)（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Over the years, hand gesture recognition has been mostly addressed considering hand trajectories in isolation. However, in most sign languages, hand gestures are defined on a particular context (body region). We propose a pipeline to perform sign language recognition which models hand movements in the context of other parts of the body captured in the 3D space using the MS Kinect sensor. In addition, we perform sign recognition based on the different hand postures that occur during a sign. Our experiments show that considering different body parts brings improved performance when compared to o…
This work presents a meta study covering around 300 published sign language recognition papers with over 400 experimental results. It includes most papers between the start of the field in 1983 and 2020. Additionally, it covers a fine-grained analysis on over 25 studies that have compared their recognition approaches on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, the standard benchmark task of the field. Research in the domain of sign language recognition has progressed significantly in the last decade, reaching a point where the task attracts much more attention than ever before. This study compiles the state…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Athena Research Center（雅典娜研究中心）
Independent Sign Language Recognition is a complex visual recognition problem that combines several challenging tasks of Computer Vision due to the necessity to exploit and fuse information from hand gestures, body features and facial expressions. While many state-of-the-art works have managed to deeply elaborate on these features independently, to the best of our knowledge, no work has adequately combined all three information channels to efficiently recognize Sign Language. In this work, we employ SMPL-X, a contemporary parametric model that enables joint extraction of 3D body shape, face an…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Linguistic knowledge is of great benefit to scene text recognition. However, how to effectively model linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from: 1) implicitly language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet for scene text recognition. Firstly, the autonomous suggests to block gradient flow between vision and language models to enforce explicitly language…
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；University of Rochester Medical Center（罗切斯特大学医学中心）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
Inspired by the human ability to infer emotions from body language, we propose an automated framework for body language based emotion recognition starting from regular RGB videos. In collaboration with psychologists, we further extend the framework for psychiatric symptom prediction. Because a specific application domain of the proposed framework may only supply a limited amount of data, the framework is designed to work on a small training set and possess a good transferability. The proposed system in the first stage generates sequences of body language predictions based on human poses estima…
Sign Language Recognition (SLR) is an important step in facilitating the communication among deaf people and the rest of society. Existing Persian sign language recognition systems are mainly restricted to static signs which are not very useful in everyday communications. In this study, a dynamic Persian sign language recognition system is presented. A collection of 1200 videos were captured from 12 individuals performing 20 dynamic signs with a simple white glove. The trajectory of the hands, along with hand shape information were extracted from each video using a simple region-growing techni…
Sign language is a beautiful visual language and is also the primary language used by speaking and hearing-impaired people. However, sign language has many complex expressions, which are difficult for the public to understand and master. Sign language recognition algorithms will significantly facilitate communication between hearing-impaired people and normal people. Traditional continuous sign language recognition often uses a sequence learning method based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM). These methods can only learn spatial and temporal featur…
Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Training state-of-the-art offline handwriting recognition (HWR) models requires large labeled datasets, but unfortunately such datasets are not available in all languages and domains due to the high cost of manual labeling.We address this problem by showing how high resource languages can be leveraged to help train models for low resource languages.We propose a transfer learning methodology where we adapt HWR models trained on a source language to a target language that uses the same writing script.This methodology only requires labeled data in the source language, unlabeled data in the target…
In this paper, we propose a set of features called temporal accumulative features (TAF) for representing and recognizing isolated sign language gestures. By incorporating sign language specific constructs to better represent the unique linguistic characteristic of sign language videos, we have devised an efficient and fast SLR method for recognizing isolated sign language gestures. The proposed method is an HSV based accumulative video representation where keyframes based on the linguistic movement-hold model are represented by different colors. We also incorporate hand shape information and u…
Sign language recognition (SLR) plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gap between the hearing and vocally impaired community and the rest of the society. Word-level sign language recognition (WSLR) is the first important step towards understanding and interpreting sign language. However, recognizing signs from videos is a challenging task as the meaning of a word depends on a combination of subtle body motions, hand configurations, and other movements. Recent pose-based architectures for WSLR either model both the spatial and temporal dependencies among the poses in different fram…
Deaf people are using sign language for communication, and it is a combination of gestures, movements, postures, and facial expressions that correspond to alphabets and words in spoken languages. The proposed Arabic sign language recognition model helps deaf and hard hearing people communicate effectively with ordinary people. The recognition has four stages of converting the alphabet into letters as follows: Image Loading stage, which loads the images of Arabic sign language alphabets that were used later to train and test the model, a pre-processing stage which applies image processing techn…
In the past decades the set of human tasks that are solved by machines was extended dramatically. From simple image classification problems researchers now move towards solving more sophisticated and vital problems, like, autonomous driving and language translation. The case of language translation includes a challenging area of sign language translation that incorporates both image and language processing. We make a step in that direction by proposing a lightweight network for ASL gesture recognition with a performance sufficient for practical applications. The proposed solution demonstrates …
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Sign languages are visual languages which convey information by signers' handshape, facial expression, body movement, and so forth. Due to the inherent restriction of combinations of these visual ingredients, there exist a significant number of visually indistinguishable signs (VISigns) in sign languages, which limits the recognition capacity of vision neural networks. To mitigate the problem, we propose the Natural Language-Assisted Sign Language Recognition (NLA-SLR) framework, which exploits semantic information contained in glosses (sign labels). First, for VISigns with similar semantic me…
University Sains Malaysia（马来西亚理科大学）；University of Sindh（信德大学）
A large number of publications are available for the Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Significant researches, as well as articles are present for the Latin, Chinese and Japanese scripts. Arabic script is also one of mature script from OCR perspective. The adaptive languages which share Arabic script or its extended characters; still lacking the OCRs for their language. In this paper we present the efforts of researchers on Arabic and its related and adapted languages. This survey is organized in different sections, in which introduction is followed by properties of Sindhi Language. OCR pro…
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The visual world naturally exhibits a long-tailed distribution of open classes, which poses great challenges to modern visual systems. Existing approaches either perform class re-balancing strategies or directly improve network modules to address the problem. However, they still train models with a finite set of predefined labels, limiting their supervision information and restricting their transferability to novel instances. Recent advances in large-scale contrastive visual-language pretraining shed light on a new pathway for visual recognition. With open-vocabulary supervisions, pretrained c…
Information Technology University (ITU)-Punjab（旁遮普信息技术大学）；COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI)（伊斯兰堡COMSATS大学）
Cross-lingual speech emotion recognition is an important task for practical applications. The performance of automatic speech emotion recognition systems degrades in cross-corpus scenarios, particularly in scenarios involving multiple languages or a previously unseen language such as Urdu for which limited or no data is available. In this study, we investigate the problem of cross-lingual emotion recognition for Urdu language and contribute URDU---the first ever spontaneous Urdu-language speech emotion database. Evaluations are performed using three different Western languages against Urdu and…
This paper presents a novel training method for end-to-end scene text recognition. End-to-end scene text recognition offers high recognition accuracy, especially when using the encoder-decoder model based on Transformer. To train a highly accurate end-to-end model, we need to prepare a large image-to-text paired dataset for the target language. However, it is difficult to collect this data, especially for resource-poor languages. To overcome this difficulty, our proposed method utilizes well-prepared large datasets in resource-rich languages such as English, to train the resource-poor encoder-…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
In this thesis, we study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL, and recognizing it is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work, we propose several types of recognition approaches, and explore the signer variation problem. Our best-performing models are se…
Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this work, we…
Impressive progress has been made in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. However, it remains a challenge to find the best point of interaction for these very different modalities. In this chapter we discuss how attributes allow us to exchange information between the two modalities and in this way lead to an interaction on a semantic level. Specifically we discuss how attributes allow using knowledge mined from language resources for recognizing novel visual categories, how we can generate sentence description about images and video, how we can ground natural language…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
We address the problem of automatic American Sign Language fingerspelling recognition from video. Prior work has largely relied on frame-level labels, hand-crafted features, or other constraints, and has been hampered by the scarcity of data for this task. We introduce a model for fingerspelling recognition that addresses these issues. The model consists of an auto-encoder-based feature extractor and an attention-based neural encoder-decoder, which are trained jointly. The model receives a sequence of image frames and outputs the fingerspelled word, without relying on any frame-level training …
A large amount of recent research has focused on tasks that combine language and vision, resulting in a proliferation of datasets and methods. One such task is action recognition, whose applications include image annotation, scene under- standing and image retrieval. In this survey, we categorize the existing ap- proaches based on how they conceptualize this problem and provide a detailed review of existing datasets, highlighting their di- versity as well as advantages and disad- vantages. We focus on recently devel- oped datasets which link visual informa- tion with linguistic resources and p…
Prior work on Sign Language Translation has shown that having a mid-level sign gloss representation (effectively recognizing the individual signs) improves the translation performance drastically. In fact, the current state-of-the-art in translation requires gloss level tokenization in order to work. We introduce a novel transformer based architecture that jointly learns Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation while being trainable in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by using a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to bind the recognition and translation problems …
This paper proposes an attentional network for the task of Continuous Sign Language Recognition. The proposed approach exploits co-independent streams of data to model the sign language modalities. These different channels of information can share a complex temporal structure between each other. For that reason, we apply attention to synchronize and help capture entangled dependencies between the different sign language components. Even though Sign Language is multi-channel, handshapes represent the central entities in sign interpretation. Seeing handshapes in their correct context defines the…
