Spatial Attention-Based 3D Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Sign Language Recognition.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Sign language is the main channel for hearing-impaired people to communicate with others. It is a visual language that conveys highly structured components of manual and non-manual parameters such that it needs a lot of effort to master by hearing people. Sign language recognition aims to facilitate this mastering difficulty and bridge the communication gap between hearing-impaired people and others. This study presents an efficient architecture for sign language recognition based on a convolutional graph neural network (GCN). The presented architecture consists of a few separable 3DGCN layers, which are enhanced by a spatial attention mechanism. The limited number of layers in the proposed architecture enables it to avoid the common over-smoothing problem in deep graph neural networks. Furthermore, the attention mechanism enhances the spatial context representation of the gestures. The proposed architecture is evaluated on different datasets and shows outstanding results.

Authors

  • Muneer Al-Hammadi
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Mohamed A Bencherif
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Mansour Alsulaiman
    Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Ghulam Muhammad
    Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: ghulam@ksu.edu.sa.
  • Mohamed Amine Mekhtiche
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Wadood Abdul
    Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Yousef A Alohali
    Computer Science Department, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Electronic address: yousef@ksu.edu.sa.
  • Tareq S Alrayes
    Department of Special Education, College of Education, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Hassan Mathkour
    Computer Science Department, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Mohammed Faisal
    College of Applied Computer Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 145111, Saudi Arabia.
  • Mohammed Algabri
    Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Hamdi Altaheri
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Taha Alfakih
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.
  • Hamid Ghaleb
    Centre of Smart Robotics Research (CS2R), King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia.