arXiv AI

Isharah-Selfie: Continuous Sign Language Recognition Dataset for One-handed Signing

Isharah‑Selfie is a large‑scale Arabic Sign Language dataset collected entirely with front‑facing smartphone cameras in unconstrained selfie conditions. It contains 8,997 video clips from 16 signers across 1,493 unique sentences, annotated with gloss sequences for continuous sign language recognition and Arabic sentence translations for sign language translation. The dataset focuses on realistic mobile communication, featuring one‑handed signing, close‑range viewpoints, partial body visibility, camera motion, unconstrained environments, and heterogeneous device resolutions, and introduces signer‑independent and unseen‑sentence evaluation protocols.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

SignMatch: Matching Dictionary Signs to Continuous Sign Language Video

SignMatch introduces a prototype‑structured embedding space that learns to match dictionary sign videos with continuous sign language footage based solely on visual similarity of handshape and motion. By mapping isolated dictionary exemplars into this space, the method enables direct, embedding‑based sign matching and can generalise to unseen signs using only dictionary examples. Experiments on ASL‑Citizen, ChaLearn OSLWL, and BOBSL CSLR2 benchmarks show strong cross‑dataset, cross‑task, and cross‑language performance, outperforming prior approaches on American, British, and Spanish sign languages without benchmark‑specific supervision.

By Ryan Wong, Youngjoon Jang, Liliane Momeni, G\"ul Varol, Andrew Zisserman
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

arXiv:2606. 11925v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities.

By Zsolt Robotka, \'Ad\'am R\'ak, Jalal Al-Afandi, Andr\'as Horv\'ath, Gy\"orgy Cserey
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

SignSeek: Learning Transferable Representations for Sign Dictionary Retrieval

SignSeek is a new method for learning transferable sign representations that enables efficient retrieval of signs from dictionaries using only a query video. It employs contrastive learning with saliency‑guided articulator masking, aligning same‑gloss signs across signers while focusing on the single most critical articulator per sign. Trained on 266K samples from multiple sign languages, SignSeek achieves state‑of‑the‑art cross‑corpus retrieval performance and zero‑shot generalisation to unseen British Sign Language, also improving isolated sign recognition and subtitle alignment.

By Sobhan Asasi, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard Bowden
arXiv AI
Jul 7

ViPo-MLLM: Visual-Pose Multimodal LLM for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

arXiv:2607. 03657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (SLT) translates sign language videos into spoken-language sentences without gloss annotations, avoiding costly labeling but requiring fine-grained modeling of hands, body, and facial cues.

By Ahmed Abul Hasanaath, Bicheng Xu, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Leonid Sigal, Hamzah Luqman
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting

SMART is a new framework that jointly tackles continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) and spotting by leveraging a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to generate motion descriptions as auxiliary semantic cues. It performs stable video‑text alignment with small batch sizes and introduces a Multi‑Scale Temporal Adapter to capture temporal interactions during transformer encoding. The framework also incorporates CSFormer, a CSLR‑guided spotting module that injects recognition‑derived gloss evidence into a boundary‑aware spotting network, enabling mutual benefit between recognition and spotting tasks.

By Eunjee Choi, JungHoon Sung, Seongwhan Cho, Chu Xin, Younggeun Choi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

SignGPT: Toward LLM-Mediated Sign Language Interaction through Gloss-Free Translation and Generation

SignGPT is a unified, pose‑based framework that performs gloss‑free sign language translation (SLT) and generation (SLG) by integrating part‑aware hierarchical representations of body, hand, and facial motion into a shared language model. It uses asymmetric multi‑token prediction and progressive training for bidirectional modeling, and is evaluated on How2Sign (ASL) and Phoenix‑2014T (DGS) with benchmark comparisons, qualitative analyses, and component ablations. An exploratory study with 12 Deaf ASL signers demonstrates a sign‑to‑sign response pipeline, suggesting that unified modeling can support sign language conversation (SLC).

By Ronghui Li, Jun Dong, Zhongyuan Hu, Zunnan Xu, Jun Zhou, Liyuan Chen, Shuoling Liu, Jiangpeng Yan, Jie Guo, Xiu Li, Linchao Bao
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Bridging the Gap Between Semantics and Reconstruction:Unifying Sign Language Translation and Production

arXiv:2608. 09045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in sign language (SL) research have shown a trend toward unifying multiple sign language understanding (SLU) subtasks, such as isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), and sign language translation (SLT), within a single framework, leading to substantial progress.

By Xiao Liu, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin, Jiaxin Yin, Bowen Guo, Yaqi Sun, Zhiwei Jiang, Lei Xie