A simple and effective static gesture recognition method based on attention mechanism

To solve the problem of low sign language recognition rate under the condition of small samples, a simple and effective static gesture recognition method based on an attention mechanism is proposed. The method proposed in this paper can enhance the features of both the details and the subject of the gesture image. The input of the proposed method depends on the intermediate feature map generated by the original network. Also, the proposed convolutional model is a lightweight general module, which can be seamlessly integrated into any CNN(Convolutional Neural Network) architecture and achieve significant performance gains with minimal overhead. Experiments on two different datasets show that the proposed method is effective and can improve the accuracy of sign language recognition of the benchmark model, making its performance better than the existing methods.     

Block-based histogram of optical flow for isolated sign language recognition

In this paper, we propose a block-based histogram of optical flow (BHOF) to generate hand representation in sign language recognition. Optical flow of the sign language video is computed in a region centered around the location of the detected hand position. The hand patches of optical flow are segmented into M spatial blocks, where each block is a cuboid of a segment of a frame across the entire sign gesture video. The histogram of each block is then computed and normalized by its sum. The feature vector of all blocks are then concatenated as the BHOF sign gesture representation. The proposed method provides a compact scale-invariant representation of the sign language. Furthermore, block-based histogram encodes spatial information and provides local translation invariance in the extracted optical flow. Additionally, the proposed BHOF also introduces sign language length invariancy into its representation, and thereby, produce promising recognition rate in signer independent problems.