SL-ReDu: Greek sign language recognition for educational applications. Project description and early results

Abstract

We present SL-ReDu, a recently commenced innovative project that aims to exploit deep-learning progress to advance the state-of-the-art in video-based automatic recognition of Greek Sign Language (GSL), while focusing on the use-case of GSL education as a second language. We first briefly overview the project goals, focal areas, and timeline. We then present our initial deep learning-based approach for GSL recognition that employs efficient visual tracking of the signer hands, convolutional neural networks for feature extraction, and attention-based encoder-decoder sequence modeling for sign prediction. Finally, we report experimental results for small-vocabulary, isolated GSL recognition on the single-signer "Polytropon" corpus. To our knowledge, this work constitutes the first application of deep-learning techniques to GSL. © 2020 ACM.