Abstract
Continuous sign language recognition (SLR) is a challenging task that requires learning on both spatial and temporal dimensions of signing frame sequences. Most recent work accomplishes this by using CNN and RNN hybrid networks. However, training these networks is generally non-trivial, and most of them fail in learning unseen sequence patterns, causing an unsatisfactory performance for online recognition. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional network (FCN) for online SLR to concurrently learn spatial and temporal features from weakly annotated video sequences with only sentence-level annotations given. A gloss feature enhancement (GFE) module is introduced in the proposed network to enforce better sequence alignment learning. The proposed network is end-to-end trainable without any pre-training. We conduct experiments on two large scale SLR datasets. Experiments show that our method for continuous SLR is effective and performs well in online recognition.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Camgoz, N., Hadfield, S., Koller, O., Ney, H., Bowden, R.: Neural sign language translation. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 7784–7793 (2018)
Camgoz, N.C., Hadfield, S., Koller, O., Bowden, R.: Subunets: end-to-end hand shape and continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 3075–3084 (2017)
Cooper, H., Bowden, R.: Learning signs from subtitles: a weakly supervised approach to sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 2568–2574 (2009)
Cui, R., Liu, H., Zhang, C.: Recurrent convolutional neural networks for continuous sign language recognition by staged optimization. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1610–1618 (2017)
Cui, R., Liu, H., Zhang, C.: A deep neural framework for continuous sign language recognition by iterative training. IEEE Trans. Multimedia 21, 1880–1891 (2019)
Evangelidis, G.D., Singh, G., Horaud, R.: Continuous gesture recognition from articulated poses. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 595–607 (2015)
Fang, G., Gao, W.: A SRN/HMM system for signer-independent continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face Gesture Recognition, pp. 312–317 (2002)
Farhadi, A., Forsyth, D.: Aligning ASL for statistical translation using a discriminative word model. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1471–1476 (2006)
Graves, A., Fernández, S., Gomez, F., Schmidhuber, J.: Connectionist temporal classification: Labelling unsegmented sequence data with recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 369–376 (2006)
Guo, D., Zhou, W., Li, H., Wang, M.: Online early-late fusion based on adaptive HMM for sign language recognition. ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Communi. Appl. 14, 1–18 (2017)
Guo, D., Zhou, W., Li, H., Wang, M.: Hierarchical LSTM for sign language translation. In: Proceedings of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 6845–6852 (2018)
Guo, D., Zhou, W., Wang, M., Li, H.: Sign language recognition based on adaptive HMMs with data augmentation. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, pp. 2876–2880 (2016)
Han, J., Awad, G., Sutherland, A.: Modelling and segmenting subunits for sign language recognition based on hand motion analysis. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 30, 623–633 (2009)
Huang, J., Zhou, W., Zhang, Q., Li, H., Li, W.: Video-based sign language recognition without temporal segmentation. In: Proceedings of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 2257–2264 (2018)
Ioffe, S., Szegedy, C.: Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 448–456 (2015)
Kelly, D., McDonald, J., Markham, C.: Recognizing spatiotemporal gestures and movement epenthesis in sign language. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Image Processing and Machine Vision, pp. 145–150 (2009)
Kingma, D.P., Ba, J.: Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. CoRR preprint CoRR:1412.6980 (2014)
Koller, O., Forster, J., Ney, H.: Continuous sign language recognition: towards large vocabulary statistical recognition systems handling multiple signers. Comput. Vis. Image Underst. 141, 108–125 (2015)
Koller, O., Ney, H., Bowden, R.: Deep hand: how to train a CNN on 1 million hand images when your data is continuous and weakly labelled. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3793–3802 (2016)
Koller, O., Zargaran, S., Ney, H.: Re-sign: re-aligned end-to-end sequence modelling with deep recurrent CNN-HMMs. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3416–3424 (2017)
Koller, O., Zargaran, S., Ney, H., Bowden, R.: Deep sign: hybrid CNN-HMM for continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of British Machine Vision Conference, pp. 136.1–136.12 (2016)
Liddell, S.K.: Grammar, Gestures, and Meaning in American Sign Language, pp. 52–53. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Liwicki, M., Graves, A., Bunke, H., Schmidhuber, J.: A novel approach to on-line handwriting recognition based on bidirectional long short-term memory networks. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 367–371 (2007)
Long, J., Shelhamer, E., Darrell, T.: Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3431–3440 (2015)
Miao, Y., Gowayyed, M., Metze, F.: Eesen: end-to-end speech recognition using deep RNN models and WFST-based decoding. In: IEEE Conference on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshops, pp. 167–174 (2015)
Molchanov, P., Yang, X., Gupta, S., Kim, K., Tyree, S., Kautz, J.: Online detection and classification of dynamic hand gestures with recurrent 3D convolutional neural networks. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4207–4215 (2016)
Ong, S., Ranganath, S.: Automatic sign language analysis: a survey and the future beyond lexical meaning. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 27, 873–91 (2005)
Pan, Y., Mei, T., Yao, T., Li, H., Rui, Y.: Jointly modeling embedding and translation to bridge video and language. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4594–4602 (2015)
Pitsikalis, V., Theodorakis, S., Vogler, C., Maragos, P.: Advances in phonetics-based sub-unit modeling for transcription alignment and sign language recognition. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, pp. 1–6 (2011)
Pu, J., Zhou, W., Li, H.: Dilated convolutional network with iterative optimization for continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 885–891 (2018)
Pu, J., Zhou, W., Li, H.: Iterative alignment network for continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4165–4174 (2019)
Puigcerver, J.: Are multidimensional recurrent layers really necessary for handwritten text recognition? In: Proceedings of International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 67–72 (2017)
Sak, H., Senior, A., Rao, K., İrsoy, O., Graves, A., Beaufays, F., Schalkwyk, J.: Learning acoustic frame labeling for speech recognition with recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 4280–4284 (2015)
Sun, C., Zhang, T., Bao, B.K., Xu, C., Mei, T.: Discriminative exemplar coding for sign language recognition with kinect. IEEE Trans. Cybern. 43, 1418–1428 (2013)
Theodorakis, S., Katsamanis, A., Maragos, P.: Product-HMMs for automatic sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pp. 1601–1604 (2009)
Vela, A.H., et al.: Probability-based dynamic time warping and bag-of-visual-and-depth-words for human gesture recognition in RGB-D. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 50, 112–121 (2014)
Venugopalan, S., Rohrbach, M., Donahue, J., Mooney, R., Darrell, T., Saenko, K.: Sequence to sequence - video to text. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 4534–4542 (2015)
Venugopalan, S., Xu, H., Donahue, J., Rohrbach, M., Mooney, R., Saenko, K.: Translating videos to natural language using deep recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 1494–1504 (2015)
Wang, B., Ma, L., Zhang, W., Liu, W.: Reconstruction network for video captioning. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 7622–7631 (2018)
Yang, H.D., Lee, S.W.: Robust sign language recognition with hierarchical conditional random fields. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 2202–2205 (2010)
Yang, R., Sarkar, S.: Detecting coarticulation in sign language using conditional random fields. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 108–112 (2006)
Yang, R., Sarkar, S.: Gesture recognition using hidden Markov models from fragmented observations. In: Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 766–773 (2006)
Yang, W., Tao, J., Ye, Z.: Continuous sign language recognition using level building based on fast hidden Markov model. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 78, 28–35 (2016)
Yang, Z., Shi, Z., Shen, X., Tai, Y.W.: SF-net: structured feature network for continuous sign language recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.01341 (2019)
Yao, L., et al.: Describing videos by exploiting temporal structure. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 4507–4515 (2015)
Yin, F., Chai, X., Zhou, Y., Chen, X.: Weakly supervised metric learning towards signer adaptation for sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of British Machine Vision Conference, pp. 35.1–35.12 (2015)
Zhang, J., Zhou, W., Li, H.: A threshold-based HMM-DTW approach for continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service, pp. 237–240 (2014)
Zhang, J., Zhou, W., Xie, C., Pu, J., Li, H.: Chinese sign language recognition with adaptive HMM. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, pp. 1–6 (2016)
Zhou, H., Zhou, W., Zhou, Y., Li, H.: Spatial-temporal multi-cue network for continuous sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 13009–13016 (2020)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
1 Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cheng, K.L., Yang, Z., Chen, Q., Tai, YW. (2020). Fully Convolutional Networks for Continuous Sign Language Recognition. In: Vedaldi, A., Bischof, H., Brox, T., Frahm, JM. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2020. ECCV 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12369. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58586-0_41
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58586-0_41
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58585-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58586-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)