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Difference-guided multi-scale spatial-temporal representation for sign language recognition

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Abstract

Sign language recognition (SLR) is a challenging task, which requires a thorough understanding of spatial-temporal visual features for translating it into comprehensible written or spoken language. However, existing SLR methods ignore the importance of key spatial-temporal representation due to its sparsity and inconsistency in space and time. To solve this problem, we present a difference-guided multi-scale spatial-temporal representation (DMST) learning model for SLR. In DMST, we devise two modules: (1) key spatial-temporal representation, to extract and enhance key spatial-temporal information by a spatial-temporal difference strategy and (2) multi-scale sequence alignment, to perceive and fuse multi-scale spatial-temporal features and achieve sequence mapping. The DMST model outperforms state-of-the-art performance on four public sign language datasets, which demonstrates the superiority of DMST model and the significance of key spatial-temporal representation for SLR.

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Notes

  1. The gloss represents the sign with its closest meaning in natural languages.

  2. https://ustc-slr.github.io/datasets/2015_csl/.

  3. https://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~koller/RWTH-PHOENIX/.

  4. https://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~koller/RWTH-PHOENIX-2014-T/.

  5. https://ustc-slr.github.io/datasets/2021_csl_daily/.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62072334).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Liqing Gao, Lianyu Hu, Fan Lyu, Liang Wan & Wei Feng

  2. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

    Lei Zhu

  3. University of Macau, Macau, China

    Chi-Man Pun

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  1. Liqing Gao
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Correspondence to Wei Feng.

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Gao, L., Hu, L., Lyu, F. et al. Difference-guided multi-scale spatial-temporal representation for sign language recognition. Vis Comput 39, 3417–3428 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-023-02979-8

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