Skeleton Based Sign Language Recognition Using Whole-body Keypoints

Sign language is a visual language that is used by deaf or speech impaired people to communicate with each other. Sign language is always performed by fast transitions of hand gestures and body postures, requiring a great amount of knowledge and training to understand it. Sign language recognition becomes a useful yet challenging task in computer vision. Skeleton-based action recognition is becoming popular that it can be further ensembled with RGB-D based method to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, skeleton-based recognition can hardly be applied to sign language recognition tasks, majorly because skeleton data contains no indication of hand gestures or facial expressions. Inspired by the recent development of whole-body pose estimation \cite{jin2020whole}, we propose recognizing sign language based on the whole-body key points and features. The recognition results are further ensembled with other modalities of RGB and optical flows to improve the accuracy further. In the challenge about isolated sign language recognition hosted by ChaLearn using a new large-scale multi-modal Turkish Sign Language dataset (AUTSL). Our method achieved leading accuracy in both the development phase and test phase. This manuscript is a fact sheet version. Our workshop paper version will be released soon. Our code has been made available at https://github.com/jackyjsy/CVPR21Chal-SLR