Papers › A Study of Convolutional Architectures for Handshape Recognition applied to Sign Language

A Study of Convolutional Architectures for Handshape Recognition applied to Sign Language

1 Oct 2017CACIC 2017 10archive 2025-07-28

Quiroga Facundo, Antonio Ramiro, Ronchetti Franco, LanzariniLaura Cristina, Rosete Alejandro

Convolutional Neural Networks have been providing a performance boost in many areas in the last few years, but their performance for Handshape Recognition in the context of Sign Language Recognition has not been thoroughly studied. We evaluated several convolutional architectures in order to determine their applicability for this problem. Using the LSA16 and RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather handshape datasets, we performed experiments with the LeNet, VGG16, ResNet-34 and All Convolutional architectures, as well as Inception with normal training and via transfer learning, and compared them to the state of the art in these datasets. We included experiments with a feedforward neural network as a baseline. We also explored various preprocessing schemes to analyze their impact on the recognition. We determined that while all models perform reasonably well on both datasets (with performance similar to hand-engineered methods), VGG16 produced the best results, closely followed by the traditional LeNet architecture. Also, pre-segmenting the hands from the background provided a big boost to accuracy.

PaperPDFCode

Code

midusi/convolutional_handshape officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Hand Gesture RecognitionSign Language RecognitionTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Hand Gesture Recognition LSA16 VGG16 Accuracy 95.92 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Hand Gesture Recognition RWTH-PHOENIX Handshapes dev set VGG16 Accuracy 82.88 #2 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.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections