Cross Transferring Activity Recognition to Word Level Sign Language Detection

The lack of large scale labelled datasets in word-level sign language recognition (WSLR) poses a challenge to detecting sign language from videos. Most WSLR approaches operate on datasets that do not model real-world settings very well, as they do not have a high degree of variability in terms of signers, background, lighting and inter signer variation. We chose the MS-ASL dataset to overcome these limitations as they model open-world settings very well. This paper benchmarks successful action recognition architectures on the MS-ASL dataset using transfer learning. We have achieved new state-of-the-art accuracy (92.35%) with an improvement of 7.03% over the previous state-of-the-art introduced by the MS-ASL paper. We have analyzed how action-recognition architectures fair in the task of WSLR, and we propose SlowFast 8x8 ResNet 101 as a robust and suitable architecture for the task of WSLR.