Millions of hearing impaired people around the world routinely use some variants of sign languages to communicate, thus the automatic translation of a sign language is meaningful and important. Currently, there are two sub-problems in Sign Language Recognition (SLR), i.e., isolated SLR that recognizes word by word and continuous SLR that translates entire sentences. Existing continuous SLR methods typically utilize isolated SLRs as building blocks, with an extra layer of preprocessing (temporal segmentation) and another layer of post-processing (sentence synthesis). Unfortunately, temporal segmentation itself is non-trivial and inevitably propagates errors into subsequent steps. Worse still, isolated SLR methods typically require strenuous labeling of each word separately in a sentence, severely limiting the amount of attainable training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel continuous sign recognition framework, the Hierarchical Attention Network with Latent Space (LS-HAN), which eliminates the preprocessing of temporal segmentation. The proposed LS-HAN consists of three components: a two-stream Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for video feature representation generation, a Latent Space (LS) for semantic gap bridging, and a Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN) for latent space based recognition. Experiments are carried out on two large scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Most existing SLR researches @cite_15 @cite_38 @cite_19 @cite_30 fall into the category of isolated SLR, i.e., recognition of words or expressions, similar to action recognition @cite_5 . A more challenging problem is the continuous SLR, which involves the reconstruction of sentence structures. Most existing continuous SLR methods divide the sentence-to-sentence recognition problem into three stages, temporal segmentation of videos, isolated word expression recognition (i.e., isolated SLR), and sentence synthesis with a language model. For example, DTW-HMM @cite_6 proposed a threshold matrix based coarse temporal segmentation step followed by a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm and a bi-grammar model. In @cite_7 , a new HMM based language model is incorporated. Recently, transitional movements attract a lot of attention @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_17 @cite_34 because they can serve as the basis for temporal segmentation.
@cite_30 @cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_19 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_34 @cite_17
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Sign Language Recognition (SLR) aims at translating the Sign Language (SL) into speech or text, so as to facilitate the communication between hearing-impaired people and the normal people. This problem has broad social impact, however it is challenging due to the variation for different people and the complexity in sign words. Traditional methods for SLR generally use handcrafted feature and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) modeling temporal information. But reliable handcrafted features are difficult to design and not able to adapt to the large variations of sign words. To approach this problem, considering that Long Short-Term memory (LSTM) can model the contextual information of temporal sequence well, we propose an end-to-end method for SLR based on LSTM. Our system takes the moving trajectories of 4 skeleton joints as inputs without any prior knowledge and is free of explicit feature design. To evaluate our proposed model, we built a large isolated Chinese sign language vocabulary with Kinect 2.0. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with traditional HMM based methods. Vision based sign language recognition (SLR) is a challenging task due to the complexity of signs and limited data collection. To improve the recognition precision, this paper proposes an adaptive GMM-based (Gaussian mixture model) HMMs (Hidden Markov Models) framework. We discover that inherent latent states in HMMs are not only related to the number of key gestures and body poses, but also related to the kinds of their translation relationships. We propose adaptive HMMs and obtain the hidden state number for each sign with affinity propagation clustering. Furthermore, to enrich the training dataset, we propose a data augmentation strategy by adding Gaussian random disturbances. Experiments on a vocabulary of 370 signs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over the comparison algorithms. We propose a new approach to modeling transition information between signs in continuous Sign Language Recognition (SLR) and address some scalability issues in designing SLR systems. In contrast to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in which the transition between speech sounds is often brief and mainly addressed by the coarticulation effect, the sign transition in continuous SLR is far from being clear and usually not easily and exactly characterized. Leveraging upon hidden Markov modeling techniques from ASR, we proposed a modeling framework for continuous SLR having the following major advantages, namely: (i) the system is easy to scale up to large-vocabulary SLR; (ii) modeling of signs as well as the transitions between signs is robust even for noisy data collected in real-world SLR; and (iii) extensions to training, decoding, and adaptation are directly applicable even with new deep learning algorithms. A pair of low-cost digital gloves affordable for the deaf and hard of hearing community is used to collect a collection of training and testing data for real-world SLR interaction applications. Evaluated on 1,024 testing sentences from five signers, a word accuracy rate of 87.4p is achieved using a vocabulary of 510 words. The SLR speed is in real time, requiring an average of 0.69s per sentence. The encouraging results indicate that it is feasible to develop real-world SLR applications based on the proposed SLR framework. This work presents an iterative re-alignment approach applicable to visual sequence labelling tasks such as gesture recognition, activity recognition and continuous sign language recognition. Previous methods dealing with video data usually rely on given frame labels to train their classifiers. However, looking at recent data sets, these labels often tend to be noisy which is commonly overseen. We propose an algorithm that treats the provided training labels as weak labels and refines the label-to-image alignment on-the-fly in a weakly supervised fashion. Given a series of frames and sequence-level labels, a deep recurrent CNN-BLSTM network is trained end-to-end. Embedded into an HMM the resulting deep model corrects the frame labels and continuously improves its performance in several re-alignments. We evaluate on two challenging publicly available sign recognition benchmark data sets featuring over 1000 classes. We outperform the state-of-the-art by up to 10 absolute and 30 relative. Recently, great progress has been made in sign language recognition. Most approaches are based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with various features, such as motion trajectory. Recognition for sign sentences is obtained from optimal path by Viterbi algorithm, however, some wrong jumps are usually caused by transitional movements between signs. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose an approach consisting of two stages: offline training and online recognition. In the offline training stage, we propose a threshold matrix and rate thresholds. Each element of the threshold matrix describes the minimal probability when a segment belongs to a sign, and rate thresholds are defined as the average probability for signs. So, if certain segment's evaluation is smaller than all the thresholds, it is regarded as a transitional movement and then it should be removed. In the online recognition stage, coarse segmentation, based on the threshold matrix, records the time interval for fine segmentation, and fine segmentation, based on Dynamic Time Warping(DTW) and Length-Root method, determines the endpoint for each candidate sign and selects the most possible one. The final recognition is obtained by concatenating the most possible signs. We evaluate our approach with Kinect-based dataset and the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. With the development of depth sensors, low latency 3D human action recognition has become increasingly important in various interaction systems, where response with minimal latency is a critical process. High latency not only significantly degrades the interaction experience of users, but also makes certain interaction systems, e.g., gesture control or electronic gaming, unattractive. In this paper, we propose a novel active skeleton representation towards low latency human action recognition . First, we encode each limb of the human skeleton into a state through a Markov random field. The active skeleton is then represented by aggregating the encoded features of individual limbs. Finally, we propose a multi-channel multiple instance learning with maximum-pattern-margin to further boost the performance of the existing model. Our method is robust in calculating features related to joint positions, and effective in handling the unsegmented sequences. Experiments on the MSR Action3D, the MSR DailyActivity3D, and the Huawei 3DLife-2013 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the model with the proposed novel representation, and its superiority over the state-of-the-art low latency recognition approaches. Sign Language Recognition (SLR) targets on interpreting the sign language into text or speech, so as to facilitate the communication between deaf-mute people and ordinary people. This task has broad social impact, but is still very challenging due to the complexity and large variations in hand actions. Existing methods for SLR use hand-crafted features to describe sign language motion and build classification models based on those features. However, it is difficult to design reliable features to adapt to the large variations of hand gestures. To approach this problem, we propose a novel 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) which extracts discriminative spatial-temporal features from raw video stream automatically without any prior knowledge, avoiding designing features. To boost the performance, multi-channels of video streams, including color information, depth clue, and body joint positions, are used as input to the 3D CNN in order to integrate color, depth and trajectory information. We validate the proposed model on a real dataset collected with Microsoft Kinect and demonstrate its effectiveness over the traditional approaches based on hand-crafted features. Sign Language Recognition (SLR) aims at translating the sign language into text or speech, so as to realize the communication between deaf-mute people and ordinary people. This paper proposes a framework based on the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) benefited from the utilization of the trajectories and hand-shape features of the original sign videos, respectively. First, we propose a new trajectory feature (enhanced shape context), which can capture the spatio-temporal information well. Second, we fetch the hand regions by Kinect mapping functions and describe each frame by HOG (pre-processed by PCA). Moreover, in order to optimize predictions, rather than fixing the number of hidden states for each sign model, we independently determine it through the variation of the hand shapes. As for recognition, we propose a combination method to fuse the probabilities of trajectory and hand shape. At last, we evaluate our approach with our self-building Kinect-based dataset and the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. HMM-based Level Building algorithm outperforms other methods.Performance rises when employing Grammar and sign length constraints.System runs faster by using a fast algorithm for HMM. Sign sequence segmentation and sign recognition are two main problems in continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) system. In recent years, dynamic time warping based Level Building (LB-DTW) algorithm has successfully dealt with both two challenges simultaneously. However, there still exists two crucial problems in LB-DTW: low recognition performance due to bad similarity function and offline due to high computation. In this paper, we use hidden Markov model (HMM) to calculate the similarity between the sign model and testing sequence, and a fast algorithm for computing the likelihood of HMM is proposed to reduce the computation complexity. Furthermore, grammar constraint and sign length constraint are employed to improve the recognition rate and a coarse segmentation method is proposed to provide the maximal level number. In experiments with a KINECT dataset of Chinese sign language containing 100 sentences composed of 5 signs each, the proposed method shows superior recognition performance and lower computation compared to other existing techniques.