Papers › StepNet: Spatial-temporal Part-aware Network for Isolated Sign Language Recognition

StepNet: Spatial-temporal Part-aware Network for Isolated Sign Language Recognition

25 Dec 2022arXiv:2212.12857archive 2025-07-28

Xiaolong Shen, Zhedong Zheng, Yi Yang

The goal of sign language recognition (SLR) is to help those who are hard of hearing or deaf overcome the communication barrier. Most existing approaches can be typically divided into two lines, i.e., Skeleton-based and RGB-based methods, but both the two lines of methods have their limitations. Skeleton-based methods do not consider facial expressions, while RGB-based approaches usually ignore the fine-grained hand structure. To overcome both limitations, we propose a new framework called Spatial-temporal Part-aware network~(StepNet), based on RGB parts. As its name suggests, it is made up of two modules: Part-level Spatial Modeling and Part-level Temporal Modeling. Part-level Spatial Modeling, in particular, automatically captures the appearance-based properties, such as hands and faces, in the feature space without the use of any keypoint-level annotations. On the other hand, Part-level Temporal Modeling implicitly mines the long-short term context to capture the relevant attributes over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our StepNet, thanks to spatial-temporal modules, achieves competitive Top-1 Per-instance accuracy on three commonly-used SLR benchmarks, i.e., 56.89% on WLASL, 77.2% on NMFs-CSL, and 77.1% on BOBSL. Additionally, the proposed method is compatible with the optical flow input and can produce superior performance if fused. For those who are hard of hearing, we hope that our work can act as a preliminary step.

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Tasks

Optical Flow EstimationSign Language Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sign Language Recognition BOBSL StepNet Actions Top-1 77.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Sign Language Recognition WLASL StepNet Top-1 Accuracy 61.17 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Sign Language Recognition WLASL-2000 StepNet Top-1 Accuracy 61.17 #4 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Sign Language Recognition WLASL100 StepNet Official Test Split true #5 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Sign Language Recognition WLASL100 StepNet Top-1 Accuracy 78.29 #5 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

SLR

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