SLGTformer: An Attention-Based Approach to Sign Language Recognition

Abstract: Sign language is the preferred method of communication of deaf or mute people, but similar to any language, it is difficult to learn and represents a significant barrier for those who are hard of hearing or unable to speak. A person's entire frontal appearance dictates and conveys specific meaning. However, this frontal appearance can be quantified as a temporal sequence of human body pose, leading to Sign Language Recognition through the learning of spatiotemporal dynamics of skeleton keypoints. We propose a novel, attention-based approach to Sign Language Recognition exclusively built upon decoupled graph and temporal self-attention: the Sign Language Graph Time Transformer (SLGTformer). SLGTformer first deconstructs spatiotemporal pose sequences separately into spatial graphs and temporal windows. SLGTformer then leverages novel Learnable Graph Relative Positional Encodings (LGRPE) to guide spatial self-attention with the graph neighborhood context of the human skeleton. By modeling the temporal dimension as intra- and inter-window dynamics, we introduce Temporal Twin Self-Attention (TTSA) as the combination of locally-grouped temporal attention (LTA) and global sub-sampled temporal attention (GSTA). We demonstrate the effectiveness of SLGTformer on the World-Level American Sign Language (WLASL) dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an ensemble-free approach on the keypoint modality. The code is available at https://github.com/neilsong/slt