Sign Language Recognition

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Overview

Sign language recognition studies how to identify isolated signs, fingerspelled words, and signs within continuous signing, often from video or body and hand keypoints. Common approaches include CNNs and Transformers for visual features, temporal models and CTC for continuous sequences, and self-supervised or contrastive learning to use limited annotations; few-shot and cross-lingual methods aim to extend recognition to new signs and languages. Benchmarks such as WLASL, PHOENIX-2014T, and ASL Citizen support comparison, but strong results on familiar signers or fixed vocabularies do not guarantee performance on unseen people, viewpoints, or real conversations. A central challenge is building broader, well-annotated datasets and models that capture linguistic structure and generalize to low-resource languages and natural signing.

Latest papers

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60 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Znaki: A Russian Fingerspelling Recognition Dataset

    Nov 2, 2026Petr Surovtsev, Pavel Korotaev, Alexander Nagaev +1Fingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    Department of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Development, DAIMLD

  2. BEACON: Distilled Begin/End-Aware Structured Decoding for Continuous Sign Language Segmentation

    Oct 29, 2026Guohou Zhang, Kalin StefanovSign Language RecognitionBoundary-Aware Segmentation

    Monash University, Australia · Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

  3. Isharah-Selfie: Continuous Sign Language Recognition Dataset for One-handed Signing

    Oct 23, 2026Ahmed Abul Hasanaath, Murtadha Aljubran, Sarah Alyami +2Sign Language DatasetsSign Language Recognition

    King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence · Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University

  4. A Hybrid Kinematic GCN and Elastic Transformer for Efficient Indian Sign Language Recognition

    Oct 10, 2026Pushp Garg, Himangshu Sarma, Mrinmoy GhoraiSign Language RecognitionTransformer

    Human Computer Interaction Lab, IIIT SriCity, India

  5. Machine Translation for Sign Languages

    Oct 1, 2026Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Anton Pelykh, Edward Fish +7Sign Language TranslationSign Language Recognition

    Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, GU2 7XH.

  6. OneSign: Unifying Sign Language Understanding Tasks with One Model

    Sep 27, 2026Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin, Xiao Liu +3Sign Language RecognitionUnified Multimodal Models

    State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

  7. Seeing Semantic Shift: Difference-Aware Sentence-Level Temporal Segmentation of Sign Language Videos

    Sep 25, 2026Bowen Guo, Shiwei Gan, Yafeng Yin +4Boundary-Aware SegmentationTemporal Action Segmentation

    State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Suzhou, China

  8. Isolated Sign Language Recognition for Icelandic Sign Language: Experiments in a Low-resource Setting

    Sep 22, 2026Finnur Ágúst Ingimundarson, Guðný Björk Þorvaldsdóttir, Mathias Müller +1Few-Shot LearningSign Language Recognition

    Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich · Communication Centre for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Iceland

  9. Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Recognition of Sign Language Handshapes

    Sep 16, 2026Marcel Granero-Moya, Carolina del Corral Farrarós, Gloria Haro +2Zero-Shot LearningSign Language Recognition

    Universitat Pompeu Fabra

  10. Learning Sign Language Recognition under Label Noise: A Study of Noise-Robust Losses for Isolated and Continuous Settings

    Sep 11, 2026Akihisa Shitara, Yoichi OchiaiNoisy-Label LearningRobust Loss Functions

    R&D Center for Digital Nature, University of Tsukuba · Faculty of Library, Information and Media Science, University of Tsukuba · Pixie Dust Technologies, Inc.

  11. RAIDAL: Redundancy-Aware Information Density Active Learning for CTC-Based Continuous Sign Language Recognition

    Sep 6, 2026Rafael A. Diniz Augusto, Gabriel L. Oliveira, Erickson R. NascimentoActive LearningSign Language Recognition

    Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil · University of Bristol Bristol, UK

  12. DINO Eats Geometry: Self-Supervised Sign Representations that Absorb Articulated Hand Geometry

    Sep 5, 2026Junyi Hu, Zhewen He, Haomian Huang +4Fingerspelling RecognitionSelf-Supervised Learning

    New York University Abu Dhabi

  13. A Reverse Sign Language Dictionary: Open-Vocabulary Sign Recognition from Continuous Signing via Video Captioning and Description Retrieval

    Sep 3, 2026Santiago Poveda-Gutiérrez, Hideki Nakayama, Mayumi BonoVideo CaptioningVision-Language Retrieval

    Grad. School of IST The University of Tokyo Tokyo, Japan · Information and Society Research Division National Institute of Informatics Tokyo, Japan

  14. SignSeek: Learning Transferable Representations for Sign Dictionary Retrieval

    Sep 3, 2026Sobhan Asasi, Ozge Mercanoglu Sincan, Richard BowdenContrastive LearningRepresentation Learning

    CVSSP, University of Surrey

  15. SignMatch: Matching Dictionary Signs to Continuous Sign Language Video

    Sep 1, 2026Ryan Wong, Youngjoon Jang, Liliane Momeni +2Sign Language Recognition

    Visual Geometry Group Department of Engineering Science University of Oxford UK · LIGM, École des Ponts, IP Paris, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS France

  16. SMART: MLLM-guided Temporal Alignment for Unifying Sign Language Recognition and Spotting

    Aug 26, 2026Eunjee Choi, JungHoon Sung, Seongwhan Cho +2Sign Language RecognitionVision-Language Alignment

    Dankook University · Yongin, Korea

  17. JSL-DC: A Word-Level Japanese Sign Language Dataset with Linguist-Derived Descriptions for Distinguishing Confusable Signs

    Aug 19, 2026Ken Takaki, Asuka Ando, Misa Suzuki +12Sign Language DatasetsSign Language Recognition

    The University of Tokyo · Independent · Kwansei Gakuin University +3

  18. Cross-Sign Language Transfer Learning Using Domain Adaptation with Multi-scale Temporal Alignment

    Aug 17, 2026Keren Artiaga, Yang Li, Ercan Engin Kuruoglu +2Sign Language RecognitionCross-Lingual Transfer

    Victor · Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Insitute, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, The University Town, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, 518055, P.R.China.

  19. A HamNoSys-Guided Dataset and Baselines for Fine-Grained Isolated Handshape Recognition in Sign Language

    Aug 11, 2026Ushnish Sarkar, Suvajit Patra, Bhaswar Chattopadhyay +2Sign Language RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    Computer and Informatics Group, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata, 700064, India. · Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai, 400094, India. · Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute, Belur, 711202, India.

  20. Sign Language Recognition Using Original and Synthetic Depth Image Based Point Cloud Data Models

    Aug 10, 2026Rustem Ozakar, Eyup GedikliPoint Cloud ClassificationSign Language Recognition

    Department of Computer Engineering Erzurum Technical University Erzurum, Turkey · Department of Computer Engineering Trabzon University Trabzon, Turkey

  21. Toward Deployable Bangla Sign Language Recognition with Expert-Validated Data and a Lightweight Attention-Based Model

    Aug 6, 2026Saad Ahmed, Md Khalid SyfullahConvolutional Neural NetworksSign Language Recognition

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh Army University of Science and Technology, Saidpur Cantonment, Saidpur, Bangladesh

  22. A Low-Cost Hybrid Reservoir Computing Model for Isolated Sign Language Video Recognition

    Aug 4, 2026Nitin Kumar Singh, Arie Rachmad Syulistyo, Yuichiro Tanaka +1Reservoir ComputingSign Language Recognition

    Woosong University Kazakhstan, Turkistan City, Kazakhstan · Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (DSAIL), Woosong University Kazakhstan, Turkistan City, Kazakhstan · Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, 2-4 Hibikino, Wakamatsu, Kitakyushu, 808-0196, Japan +2

  23. TransSLR: A Lightweight Transformer for Sign Language Recognition

    Aug 3, 2026Lucia Yen Wanchi, Samuel Johnny, Victor Tolulope Olufemi +2Sign Language Recognition

    Carnegie Mellon University Africa

  24. Sign Language Question Answering: A New Task, Benchmark, and Baseline for Sign Language Understanding

    Jul 30, 2026Shiwei Gan, Lichen Wang, Xiao Liu +4Sign Language RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

  25. The In-Car Sign Language Corpus (ICSL): A Multi-Modal Resource for Constrained-Space Sign Language Recognition

    Jul 13, 2026Raviteja Boddu, Guilherme Vieira Leite, Joed Lopes da Silva +9Sign Language RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt (THI), Bayern, Germany · Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo, Brazil · Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil

  26. Do Transformer Temporal Heads and Post-Pooling Motion Gates Help CorrNet-based CSLR? An Empirical Study

    Jul 10, 2026Lisi Wang, Zhidong Xiao, Jianjun PengTransformerSign Language Recognition

    University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia · National Centre for Computer Animation, Faculty of Media, Science and Technology, Bournemouth University, BH12 5BB, United Kingdom · School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian Polytechnic University, Dalian 116034, China

  27. Semantic Hardness Is Not Visual Hardness: Sign-Aware Hard Negative Mining for Sign Language Retrieval

    Jul 10, 2026Junmyeong Lee, Chan Hur, ChangSu Choi +5Hard Negative MiningCross-Modal Retrieval

    School of Computing1 · ETRI Medical Informatics Laboratory4 · Graduate School of Culture Technology2 +1

  28. Phonological Perception of Sign Language Models

    Jun 27, 2026Kayo Yin, Jessica Carter, Alex Xijie Lu +1Sign Language RecognitionComputational Psycholinguistics

    University of California, Berkeley · Johns Hopkins University · Microsoft Research

  29. SignNet-1M: Large-Scale Multilingual Sign Language Video Dataset with Downstream Benchmarks

    Jun 23, 2026Zhewen He, Junyi Hu, Haomian Huang +3Distribution Shift RobustnessSynthetic Data Augmentation

    New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE · ChatSign Technology · Tsinghua University, China

  30. Deep Learning-Based Sign Language Recognition from Videos and Cross-Lingual Translation to Indian Vernaculars

    Jun 21, 2026Ramesh Nandipalli, Chandranath AdakSign Language TranslationSign Language Recognition

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Bihar, India