OpenFS: Multi-Hand-Capable Fingerspelling Recognition with Implicit Signing-Hand Detection and Frame-Wise Letter-Conditioned Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cha, Junuk, Kim, Jihyeon, Park, Han-Mu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917364110458880
author Cha, Junuk
Kim, Jihyeon
Park, Han-Mu
author_facet Cha, Junuk
Kim, Jihyeon
Park, Han-Mu
contents Fingerspelling is a component of sign languages in which words are spelled out letter by letter using specific hand poses. Automatic fingerspelling recognition plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gap between Deaf and hearing communities, yet it remains challenging due to the signing-hand ambiguity issue, the lack of appropriate training losses, and the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Prior fingerspelling recognition methods rely on explicit signing-hand detection, which often leads to recognition failures, and on a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss, which exhibits the peaky behavior problem. To address these issues, we develop OpenFS, an open-source approach for fingerspelling recognition and synthesis. We propose a multi-hand-capable fingerspelling recognizer that supports both single- and multi-hand inputs and performs implicit signing-hand detection by incorporating a dual-level positional encoding and a signing-hand focus (SF) loss. The SF loss encourages cross-attention to focus on the signing hand, enabling implicit signing-hand detection during recognition. Furthermore, without relying on the CTC loss, we introduce a monotonic alignment (MA) loss that enforces the output letter sequence to follow the temporal order of the input pose sequence through cross-attention regularization. In addition, we propose a frame-wise letter-conditioned generator that synthesizes realistic fingerspelling pose sequences for OOV words. This generator enables the construction of a new synthetic benchmark, called FSNeo. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in recognition and validate the effectiveness of the proposed recognizer and generator. Codes and data are available in: https://github.com/AIRC-KETI/OpenFS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_22949
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OpenFS: Multi-Hand-Capable Fingerspelling Recognition with Implicit Signing-Hand Detection and Frame-Wise Letter-Conditioned Synthesis
Cha, Junuk
Kim, Jihyeon
Park, Han-Mu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fingerspelling is a component of sign languages in which words are spelled out letter by letter using specific hand poses. Automatic fingerspelling recognition plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gap between Deaf and hearing communities, yet it remains challenging due to the signing-hand ambiguity issue, the lack of appropriate training losses, and the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. Prior fingerspelling recognition methods rely on explicit signing-hand detection, which often leads to recognition failures, and on a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss, which exhibits the peaky behavior problem. To address these issues, we develop OpenFS, an open-source approach for fingerspelling recognition and synthesis. We propose a multi-hand-capable fingerspelling recognizer that supports both single- and multi-hand inputs and performs implicit signing-hand detection by incorporating a dual-level positional encoding and a signing-hand focus (SF) loss. The SF loss encourages cross-attention to focus on the signing hand, enabling implicit signing-hand detection during recognition. Furthermore, without relying on the CTC loss, we introduce a monotonic alignment (MA) loss that enforces the output letter sequence to follow the temporal order of the input pose sequence through cross-attention regularization. In addition, we propose a frame-wise letter-conditioned generator that synthesizes realistic fingerspelling pose sequences for OOV words. This generator enables the construction of a new synthetic benchmark, called FSNeo. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in recognition and validate the effectiveness of the proposed recognizer and generator. Codes and data are available in: https://github.com/AIRC-KETI/OpenFS.
title OpenFS: Multi-Hand-Capable Fingerspelling Recognition with Implicit Signing-Hand Detection and Frame-Wise Letter-Conditioned Synthesis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.22949