Papers › Siformer: Feature-isolated Transformer for Efficient Skeleton-based Sign Language Recognition

Siformer: Feature-isolated Transformer for Efficient Skeleton-based Sign Language Recognition

26 Mar 2025ACM Multimedia 2024 10arXiv:2503.20436archive 2025-07-28

Muxin Pu, Mei Kuan Lim, Chun Yong Chong

Sign language recognition (SLR) refers to interpreting sign language glosses from given videos automatically. This research area presents a complex challenge in computer vision because of the rapid and intricate movements inherent in sign languages, which encompass hand gestures, body postures, and even facial expressions. Recently, skeleton-based action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to handle variations in subjects and backgrounds independently. However, current skeleton-based SLR methods exhibit three limitations: 1) they often neglect the importance of realistic hand poses, where most studies train SLR models on non-realistic skeletal representations; 2) they tend to assume complete data availability in both training or inference phases, and capture intricate relationships among different body parts collectively; 3) these methods treat all sign glosses uniformly, failing to account for differences in complexity levels regarding skeletal representations. To enhance the realism of hand skeletal representations, we present a kinematic hand pose rectification method for enforcing constraints. Mitigating the impact of missing data, we propose a feature-isolated mechanism to focus on capturing local spatial-temporal context. This method captures the context concurrently and independently from individual features, thus enhancing the robustness of the SLR model. Additionally, to adapt to varying complexity levels of sign glosses, we develop an input-adaptive inference approach to optimise computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as evidenced by achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on WLASL100 and LSA64. For WLASL100, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 86.50\%, marking a relative improvement of 2.39% over the previous SOTA. For LSA64, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 99.84%.

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Code

mpuu00001/Siformer mentioned in paperpytorch report

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Tasks

Action RecognitionComputational EfficiencySign Language RecognitionSkeleton Based Action Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sign Language Recognition LSA64 Siformer Accuracy (%) 99.84 #2 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Sign Language Recognition WLASL100 Siformer Top-1 Accuracy 86.50 #2 of 7 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

AttentionFocusSLRSoftmax

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