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. SignVLA: Real-Time Sign Language-Guided Robotic Manipulation via Attention LSTM and Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 18, 2026Ningwei Bai, Xinyu Tan, Harry Gardner +6Sign Language TranslationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

    Department of Computer Science, University College London.

  2. What's the Point? Spatial Grammar & Index Resolution for Sign Language Processing

    Jun 6, 2026Oline Ranum, Simon Hadfield, Richard BowdenCoreference ResolutionSign Language Recognition

    Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

  3. SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

    Jun 2, 2026Zeno Testa, Antonino Furnari, Lorenzo Baraldi +1Sign Language TranslationVideo Question Answering

    University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Modena, Italy · University of Catania Catania, Italy · University of Granada, CITIC & DaSCI Institute, Spain

  4. Emotion Recognition in Sign Language Conversation

    May 22, 2026Yusong Wang, Keyu Mao, Takao Obi +2Emotion Recognition in ConversationsSign Language Recognition

    Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan · New York University, New York, 11201, USA

  5. Sign Language Recognition and Translation for Low-Resource Languages: Challenges and Pathways Forward

    May 12, 2026Nigar Alishzade, Gulchin AbdullayevaSign Language TranslationSign Language Recognition

    Engineering Faculty of Karabakh University, Khankendi, Azerbaijan · MSERA Institute of Mathematics, Baku, Azerbaijan

  6. CAST: Channel-Aware Spatial Transfer Learning with Pseudo-Image Radar for Sign Language Recognition

    May 9, 2026Md. Shakhoyat Rahman Shujon, Sheikh Md. Galib Mahim, Md. Milon Islam +4Millimeter-Wave RadarmmWave Radar Sensing

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Khulna University of Engineering & Technology · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University +2

  7. Neuromorphic visual attention for Sign-language recognition on SpiNNaker

    May 7, 2026Sarka Liskova, Olha Vedmedenko, Mazdak Fatahi +3Event-Based VisionVisual Attention

    Dept. of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic · Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

  8. SignMAE: Segmentation-Driven Self-Supervised Learning for Sign Language Recognition

    May 3, 2026Kunyuan Xie, Zhixi Cai, Kalin StefanovSelf-Supervised Pre-TrainingSign Language Recognition

    Monash University, Australia

  9. SignVerse-2M: A Two-Million-Clip Pose-Native Universe of 55+ Sign Languages

    May 3, 2026Sen Fang, Hongbin Zhong, Yanxin Zhang +2Sign Language RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    Rutgers University · Georgia Institute of Technology · Wisconsin-Madison

  10. Normativity and Productivism: Ableist Intelligence? A Degrowth Analysis of AI Sign Language Translation Tools for Deaf People

    Apr 30, 2026Nina Seron-Abouelfadil, Poppy FynesSign Language TranslationAlgorithmic Bias

    University of York

  11. Sign-Language Datasets at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey on Resources, Benchmarks, and Annotation Standards

    Apr 28, 2026Yiming Ni, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jiayu Li +1Sign Language RecognitionLow-Resource Language Processing

    Tacoma School of Engineering & Technology, University of Washington

  12. CNSL-bench: Benchmarking the Sign Language Understanding Capabilities of MLLMs on Chinese National Sign Language

    Apr 24, 2026Rui Zhao, Xuewen Zhong, Xiaoyun Zheng +2Multimodal Large Language ModelsSign Language Recognition

    School of Informatics, Xiamen University, China · 2Key Lab of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian-Taiwan (XMU), Ministry of Culture and Tourism, China · 3National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center for Education and Teaching Media, Xiamen University, China

  13. Towards Multi-View Sign Language Understanding: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

    Apr 20, 2026Xu Wang, Shengeng Tang, Wan Jiang +3Multi-View LearningSign Language Recognition

    Hefei University of Technology Hefei, China

  14. Sign Language Recognition in the Age of LLMs

    Apr 13, 2026Vaclav Javorek, Jakub Honzik, Ivan Gruber +2Sign Language RecognitionVLM Evaluation

    University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic · Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

  15. State Space Models are Effective Sign Language Learners: Exploiting Phonological Compositionality for Vocabulary-Scale Recognition

    Apr 9, 2026Bryan Cheng, Austin Jin, Jasper ZhangSign Language RecognitionCompositional Representation Learning

    William A. Shine Great Neck South High School

  16. EfficientSign: An Attention-Enhanced Lightweight Architecture for Indian Sign Language Recognition

    Apr 9, 2026Rishabh Gupta, Shravya R. NallaSign Language RecognitionEfficient Neural Network Inference

  17. Bootstrapping Sign Language Annotations with Sign Language Models

    Apr 8, 2026Colin Lea, Vasileios Baltatzis, Connor Gillis +3Fingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    Apple · Gallaudet University

  18. LA-Sign: Looped Transformers with Geometry-aware Alignment for Skeleton-based Sign Language Recognition

    Mar 30, 2026Muxin Pu, Mei Kuan Lim, Chun Yong Chong +1Sign Language RecognitionRecurrent Transformers

    School of Information Technology, Monash University · S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University

  19. Dynamic LIBRAS Gesture Recognition via CNN over Spatiotemporal Matrix Representation

    Mar 26, 2026Jasmine MoreiraGesture RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    CPGEI Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil

  20. Development of ML model for triboelectric nanogenerator based sign language detection system

    Mar 26, 2026Meshv Patel, Bikash Baro, Sayan Bayan +1Sign Language RecognitionGesture Recognition

    Department of ICT, Pandit Deendayal Energy University, Gandhinagar, India · Department of Physics, Rajiv Gandhi University, Rono Hills, Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh

  21. Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences

    Mar 19, 2026Alyssa Chan, Taein Kwon, Andrew ZissermanFingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, UK

  22. STARK: Spatio-Temporal Attention for Representation of Keypoints for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

    Mar 17, 2026Suvajit Patra, Soumitra SamantaSpatio-Temporal AttentionSign Language Recognition

    RKMVERI, Belur

  23. Geometry-Aware Metric Learning for Cross-Lingual Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition on Static Hand Keypoints

    Mar 10, 2026Chayanin Chamachot, Kanokphan LertniponphanSign Language RecognitionCross-Lingual Transfer

    Department of Computer Engineering Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University

  24. OpenFS: Multi-Hand-Capable Fingerspelling Recognition with Implicit Signing-Hand Detection and Frame-Wise Letter-Conditioned Synthesis

    Feb 26, 2026Junuk Cha, Jihyeon Kim, Han-Mu ParkFingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    KAIST · KT · KETI

  25. SignVLA: A Gloss-Free Vision-Language-Action Framework for Real-Time Sign Language-Guided Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 26, 2026Xinyu Tan, Ningwei Bai, Harry Gardener +6Vision-Language-Action ModelsHuman-Robot Interaction

    Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL), London, WC1E 6BT, U.K.

  26. How Pragmatics Shape Articulation: A Computational Case Study in STEM ASL Discourse

    Oct 27, 2025Saki Imai, Lee Kezar, Laurel Aichler +5Sign Language RecognitionSign Language Datasets

    1Northeastern University · 2Gallaudet University · University of Pittsburgh

  27. SignBind-LLM: Multi-Stage Modality Fusion for Sign Language Translation

    Aug 20, 2025Marshall Thomas, Edward Fish, Richard BowdenFingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Translation

    University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom

  28. HandReader: Advanced Techniques for Efficient Fingerspelling Recognition

    May 15, 2025Pavel Korotaev, Petr Surovtsev, Alexander Kapitanov +2Fingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    SberDevices, Russia

  29. Bukva: Russian Sign Language Alphabet

    Oct 11, 2024Petr Surovtsev, Alexander Nagaev, Karina Kvanchiani +2Fingerspelling RecognitionSign Language Recognition

    SberDevices, Moscow, Russia

  30. A Transformer-Based Contrastive Learning Approach for Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition

    Apr 5, 2022Silvan Ferreira, Esdras Costa, Marcio Dahia +1Contrastive LearningSign Language Recognition

    CESAR · Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil · Lenovo