Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chan, Alyssa, Kwon, Taein, Zisserman, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914410086268928
author Chan, Alyssa
Kwon, Taein
Zisserman, Andrew
author_facet Chan, Alyssa
Kwon, Taein
Zisserman, Andrew
contents Fingerspelling is a critical component of British Sign Language (BSL), used to spell proper names, technical terms, and words that lack established lexical signs. Fingerspelling recognition is challenging due to the rapid pace of signing and common letter omissions by native signers, while existing BSL fingerspelling datasets are either small in scale or temporally and letter-wise inaccurate. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale BSL fingerspelling dataset, FS23K, constructed using an iterative annotation framework. In addition, we propose a fingerspelling recognition model that explicitly accounts for bi-manual interactions and mouthing cues. As a result, with refined annotations, our approach halves the character error rate (CER) compared to the prior state of the art on fingerspelling recognition. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and highlight its potential to support future research in sign language understanding and scalable, automated annotation pipelines. The project page can be found at https://taeinkwon.com/projects/fs23k/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences
Chan, Alyssa
Kwon, Taein
Zisserman, Andrew
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fingerspelling is a critical component of British Sign Language (BSL), used to spell proper names, technical terms, and words that lack established lexical signs. Fingerspelling recognition is challenging due to the rapid pace of signing and common letter omissions by native signers, while existing BSL fingerspelling datasets are either small in scale or temporally and letter-wise inaccurate. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale BSL fingerspelling dataset, FS23K, constructed using an iterative annotation framework. In addition, we propose a fingerspelling recognition model that explicitly accounts for bi-manual interactions and mouthing cues. As a result, with refined annotations, our approach halves the character error rate (CER) compared to the prior state of the art on fingerspelling recognition. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and highlight its potential to support future research in sign language understanding and scalable, automated annotation pipelines. The project page can be found at https://taeinkwon.com/projects/fs23k/.
title Recognising BSL Fingerspelling in Continuous Signing Sequences
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19523