Boundary-Adaptive Encoder With Attention Method for Chinese Sign Language Recognition

The sign language signal has hierarchically related information over short and long distances. Due to the intricate temporal correlation of input sequences, Chinese sign language recognition (SLR) has a modeling challenge. The conventional encoders based on recurrent networks cannot discover and leverage the hierarchical structure of sign language well. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder method based on boundary adaptive learning for Chinese SLR. The hierarchical structure of sign language signal can be encoded by the boundary-adaptive encoder (BAE) in the proposed method. In order to improve efficiency in modeling long sign language sequences, the window attention model based on location is utilized in the decoding phase, which can generate more effective weight coefficients. Besides, we use sign language subword units to realize both isolated and continuous Chinese SLR in the same sequence learning framework in our method. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.