Millions of hearing impaired people around the world routinely use some
variants of sign languages to communicate, thus the automatic translation of a
sign language is meaningful and important. Currently, there are two
sub-problems in Sign Language Recognition (SLR), i.e., isolated SLR that
recognizes word by word and continuous SLR that translates entire sentences.
Existing continuous SLR methods typically utilize isolated SLRs as building
blocks, with an extra layer of preprocessing (temporal segmentation) and
another layer of post-processing (sentence synthesis). Unfortunately, temporal
segmentation itself is non-trivial and inevitably propagates errors into
subsequent steps. Worse still, isolated SLR methods typically require strenuous
labeling of each word separately in a sentence, severely limiting the amount of
attainable training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel
continuous sign recognition framework, the Hierarchical Attention Network with
Latent Space (LS-HAN), which eliminates the preprocessing of temporal
segmentation. The proposed LS-HAN consists of three components: a two-stream
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for video feature representation generation,
a Latent Space (LS) for semantic gap bridging, and a Hierarchical Attention
Network (HAN) for latent space based recognition. Experiments are carried out
on two large scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness
of the proposed framework.

该研究提出了一种用 Hierarchical Attention Network 和 Latent Space 实现连续手语识别的新型框架，该方法无需时间分割预处理、可以缩小语义差距，并在实验中得到了验证。