MixSignGraph: A Sign Sequence is Worth Mixed Graphs of Nodes

—Recent advances in sign language research have benefited from CNN-based backbones, which are primarily transferred from traditional computer vision tasks ( e.g. , object identification, image recognition). However, these CNN-based backbones usually excel at extracting features like contours and texture, but may struggle with capturing sign-related features. In fact, sign language tasks require focusing on sign-related regions, including the collaboration between different regions ( e.g. , left hand region and right hand region) and the effective content in a single region. To capture such region-related features, we introduce MixSignGraph, which represents sign sequences as a group of mixed graphs and designs the following three graph modules for feature extraction, i.e. , Local Sign Graph (LSG) module, Temporal Sign Graph (TSG) module and Hierarchical Sign Graph (HSG) module. Specifically, the LSG module learns the correlation of intra-frame cross-region features within one frame, i.e. , focusing on spatial features. The TSG module tracks the interaction of inter-frame cross-region features among adjacent frames, i.e. , focusing on temporal features. The HSG module aggregates the same-region features from different-granularity feature maps of a frame, i.e. , focusing on hierarchical features. In addition, to further improve the performance of sign language tasks without gloss annotations, we propose a simple yet counter-intuitive Text-driven CTC Pre-training (TCP) method, which generates pseudo gloss labels from text labels for model pre-training. Extensive experiments conducted on current five public sign language datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model. Notably, our model surpasses the SOTA models on multiple sign language tasks across several datasets, without relying on any additional cues.