Spatial–temporal transformer for end-to-end sign language recognition

Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) is an essential task for communication between hearing-impaired and people without limitations, which aims at aligning low-density video sequences with high-density text sequences. The current methods for CSLR were mainly based on convolutional neural networks. However, these methods perform poorly in balancing spatial and temporal features during visual feature extraction, making them difficult to improve the accuracy of recognition. To address this issue, we designed an end-to-end CSLR network: Spatial–Temporal Transformer Network (STTN). The model encodes and decodes the sign language video as a predicted sequence that is aligned with a given text sequence. First, since the image sequences are too long for the model to handle directly, we chunk the sign language video frames, i.e., ”image to patch”, which reduces the computational complexity. Second, global features of the sign language video are modeled at the beginning of the model, and the spatial action features of the current video frame and the semantic features of consecutive frames in the temporal dimension are extracted separately, giving rise to fully extracting visual features. Finally, the model uses a simple cross-entropy loss to align video and text. We extensively evaluated the proposed network on two publicly available datasets, CSL and RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather multi-signer 2014 (PHOENIX-2014), which demonstrated the superior performance of our work in CSLR task compared to the state-of-the-art methods.