arXiv:2608. 10588v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: Fine-grained handshape recognition supports computational sign-language transcription, recognition, and translation, but broad, phonetically defined visual inventories with signer-aware evaluation remain limited.
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.
arXiv:2606. 19352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sign languages are expressive visual languages used by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) communities.
SignBind-LLM introduces a modular framework for sign language translation that separates continuous signing, fingerspelling, and lipreading into dedicated expert streams. Each expert is pre‑trained independently on about two million pseudo‑gloss sequences, eliminating the need for manual gloss annotation. A lightweight transformer fuses the expert outputs, and a pre‑trained language model converts the fused pseudo‑glosses into fluent English, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on multiple benchmarks with lower training cost.
arXiv:2204. 02803v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sign language recognition from monocular video or 2D pose sequences is challenging, both because 3D information must be inferred from 2D observations and because the signal is inherently spatiotemporal.
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.
arXiv:2605. 01720v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing large-scale sign language resources typically provide supervision only at the level of raw video-text alignment and are often produced in laboratory settings.
arXiv:2608. 06407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Sign Language Recognition for under-represented languages remains a largely unsolved problem.
M3T introduces a discrete multi‑modal motion token system for sign language production, addressing the need for non‑manual features such as mouthings, eyebrow raises, gaze, and head movements. The approach couples FLAME’s expressive facial space with SMPL‑X body parameters and uses modality‑specific Finite Scalar Quantization VAEs to achieve high face codebook utilization (99.0%). Trained with an autoregressive transformer and a sign‑to‑text translation objective, M3T outperforms existing methods on three standard datasets, notably improving accuracy on NMFs‑CSL from 49.0% to 58.3% without large‑scale pre‑training.
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.
The paper introduces the Sequential Spatio-Temporal Attention Network (SSTAN), a Transformer-based architecture that replaces traditional Graph Convolutional Networks for sign language recognition. SSTAN uses a hierarchical, stacked design with Spatial Multi-Head Attention to model joint relationships within frames and Temporal Multi-Head Attention to capture long-range dependencies across frames, eliminating the need for predefined skeletal graphs. Experiments on large-scale datasets (WLASL, JSL, KSL) show that SSTAN, trained from scratch, achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance in fingerspelling categories and outperforms other skeleton‑only methods on WLASL, highlighting its data efficiency and ability to learn complex spatio‑temporal patterns.
The paper introduces BdSLIG, the first Bengali Sign Language Instruction Generation dataset, aimed at evaluating Vision Language Models on under-resourced SLIG tasks and long-tail visual concepts. It proposes Sign Parameter-Infused (SPI) prompting, which embeds standard sign parameters such as hand shape, motion, and orientation into textual prompts to improve zero-shot performance and produce more structured, reproducible instructions. The work seeks to promote inclusivity and advance sign language learning systems for under-resourced communities.