Sign Language Recognition with Transformer Networks

Mathieu De Coster, Mieke Van Herreweghe, Joni Dambre


Abstract
Sign languages are complex languages. Research into them is ongoing, supported by large video corpora of which only small parts are annotated. Sign language recognition can be used to speed up the annotation process of these corpora, in order to aid research into sign languages and sign language recognition. Previous research has approached sign language recognition in various ways, using feature extraction techniques or end-to-end deep learning. In this work, we apply a combination of feature extraction using OpenPose for human keypoint estimation and end-to-end feature learning with Convolutional Neural Networks. The proven multi-head attention mechanism used in transformers is applied to recognize isolated signs in the Flemish Sign Language corpus. Our proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state of the art of sign language recognition on the Flemish Sign Language corpus: we obtain an accuracy of 74.7% on a vocabulary of 100 classes. Our results will be implemented as a suggestion system for sign language corpus annotation.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.737
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6018–6024
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.737
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mathieu De Coster, Mieke Van Herreweghe, and Joni Dambre. 2020. Sign Language Recognition with Transformer Networks. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6018–6024, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Sign Language Recognition with Transformer Networks (De Coster et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.737.pdf