Papers › A comparison of small sample methods for Handshape Recognition

A comparison of small sample methods for Handshape Recognition

1 Apr 2023Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST) 2023 4archive 2025-07-28

Facundo Quiroga, Franco Ronchetti, Ulises Jeremias Cornejo Fandos, Gastón Gustavo Ríos, Pedro Dal Bianco, Waldo Hasperué, Laura Lanzarini

Automatic Sign Language Translation (SLT) systems can be a great asset to improve the communication with and within deaf communities. Currently, the main issue preventing effective translation models lays in the low availability of labelled data, which hinders the use of modern deep learning models. SLT is a complex problem that involves many subtasks, of which handshape recognition is the most important. We compare a series of models specially tailored for small datasets to improve their performance on handshape recognition tasks. We evaluate Wide-DenseNet and few-shot Prototypical Network models with and without transfer learning, and also using Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). Our findings indicate that Wide-DenseNet without transfer learning and Prototipical Networks with transfer learning provide the best results. Prototypical networks, particularly, are vastly superior when using less than 30 samples, while Wide-DenseNet achieves the best results with more samples. On the other hand, MAML does not improve performance in any scenario. These results can help to design better SLT models.

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Tasks

Hand Gesture RecognitionMeta-LearningSign Language TranslationTransfer LearningTranslation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Hand Gesture Recognition LSA16 Prototypical Networks + CNN Accuracy 98.38 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Hand Gesture Recognition RWTH-PHOENIX Handshapes dev set DenseNet Accuracy 96.05 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

MAML

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