Sign language recognition (SLR) plays a vital role in facilitating communication for the hearing-impaired community. SLR is a weakly supervised task where entire videos are annotated with glosses, making it challenging to identify the corresponding gloss within a video segment. Recent studies indicate that the main bottleneck in SLR is the insufficient training caused by the limited availability of large-scale datasets. To address this challenge, we present SignVTCL, a multi-modal continuous sign language recognition framework enhanced by visual-textual contrastive learning, which leverages the full potential of multi-modal data and the generalization ability of language model. SignVTCL integrates multi-modal data (video, keypoints, and optical flow) simultaneously to train a unified visual backbone, thereby yielding more robust visual representations. Furthermore, SignVTCL contains a visual-textual alignment approach incorporating gloss-level and sentence-level alignment to ensure precise correspondence between visual features and glosses at the level of individual glosses and sentence. Experimental results conducted on three datasets, Phoenix-2014, Phoenix-2014T, and CSL-Daily, demonstrate that SignVTCL achieves state-of-the-art results compared with previous methods.
@article{arxiv.2401.11847,
title = {SignVTCL: Multi-Modal Continuous Sign Language Recognition Enhanced by Visual-Textual Contrastive Learning},
author = {Hao Chen and Jiaze Wang and Ziyu Guo and Jinpeng Li and Donghao Zhou and Bian Wu and Chenyong Guan and Guangyong Chen and Pheng-Ann Heng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.11847},
year = {2024}
}