arXiv Computer Vision

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.

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 Computer Vision
Aug 27

Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences

The paper introduces FS23K, a large-scale British Sign Language fingerspelling dataset created through an iterative annotation framework. It also presents a recognition model that incorporates bi‑manual interactions and mouthing cues, achieving a halved character error rate compared to previous state‑of‑the‑art methods. These results underscore the dataset’s and model’s value for advancing sign language research and automated annotation pipelines.

By Alyssa Chan, Taein Kwon, Andrew Zisserman
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 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

A Reverse Sign Language Dictionary: Open-Vocabulary Sign Recognition from Continuous Signing via Video Captioning and Description Retrieval

The paper introduces a reverse sign language dictionary that recognizes signs from continuous signing without relying on gloss annotations. It does this by captioning sign-level video clips into free-form procedural descriptions using an open-weight vision‑language model, then retrieving the closest description from a multilingual sentence encoder’s vocabulary. Experiments on a Japanese Sign Language corpus show that fine‑tuning the captioner boosts seen‑class retrieval from 4.5% to 49% and improves unseen‑class retrieval from 11.5% to 21%, matching or surpassing traditional closed‑set classifiers where applicable.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

SignMimic: Robust High-Quality Sign Language Motion Generation via Human-Shape-Oblivious Pose Transfer Guidance

arXiv:2609.14122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the challenge of sign language video mimicking: given a driving video and a single reference frame, synthesize a video where the target signer...

By Zhewen He (New York University Abu Dhabi), Junyi Yu (New York University Abu Dhabi), Haomian Huang (New York University Abu Dhabi), Zhenhua Li (ChatSign Technology), Yi Fang (New York University Abu Dhabi, ChatSign Technology)