Pose-Based Sign Language Spotting via an End-to-End Encoder Architecture

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Johnny, Samuel Ebimobowei, Guda, Blessed, Aaron, Emmanuel Enejo, Gueye, Assane
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Johnny, Samuel Ebimobowei
Guda, Blessed
Aaron, Emmanuel Enejo
Gueye, Assane
author_facet Johnny, Samuel Ebimobowei
Guda, Blessed
Aaron, Emmanuel Enejo
Gueye, Assane
contents Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) has emerged as a vital field for bridging the gap between deaf and hearing communities. However, the problem of sign-to-sign retrieval or detecting a specific sign within a sequence of continuous signs remains largely unexplored. We define this novel task as Sign Language Spotting. In this paper, we present a first step toward sign language retrieval by addressing the challenge of detecting the presence or absence of a query sign video within a sentence-level gloss or sign video. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on intermediate gloss recognition or text-based matching, we propose an end-to-end model that directly operates on pose keypoints extracted from sign videos. Our architecture employs an encoder-only backbone with a binary classification head to determine whether the query sign appears within the target sequence. By focusing on pose representations instead of raw RGB frames, our method significantly reduces computational cost and mitigates visual noise. We evaluate our approach on the Word Presence Prediction dataset from the WSLP 2025 shared task, achieving 61.88\% accuracy and 60.00\% F1-score. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pose-based framework for Sign Language Spotting, establishing a strong foundation for future research in automatic sign language retrieval and verification. Code is available at https://github.com/EbimoJohnny/Pose-Based-Sign-Language-Spotting
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pose-Based Sign Language Spotting via an End-to-End Encoder Architecture
Johnny, Samuel Ebimobowei
Guda, Blessed
Aaron, Emmanuel Enejo
Gueye, Assane
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) has emerged as a vital field for bridging the gap between deaf and hearing communities. However, the problem of sign-to-sign retrieval or detecting a specific sign within a sequence of continuous signs remains largely unexplored. We define this novel task as Sign Language Spotting. In this paper, we present a first step toward sign language retrieval by addressing the challenge of detecting the presence or absence of a query sign video within a sentence-level gloss or sign video. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on intermediate gloss recognition or text-based matching, we propose an end-to-end model that directly operates on pose keypoints extracted from sign videos. Our architecture employs an encoder-only backbone with a binary classification head to determine whether the query sign appears within the target sequence. By focusing on pose representations instead of raw RGB frames, our method significantly reduces computational cost and mitigates visual noise. We evaluate our approach on the Word Presence Prediction dataset from the WSLP 2025 shared task, achieving 61.88\% accuracy and 60.00\% F1-score. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pose-based framework for Sign Language Spotting, establishing a strong foundation for future research in automatic sign language retrieval and verification. Code is available at https://github.com/EbimoJohnny/Pose-Based-Sign-Language-Spotting
title Pose-Based Sign Language Spotting via an End-to-End Encoder Architecture
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08738