CoSign: Exploring Co-occurrence Signals in Skeleton-based Continuous Sign Language Recognition

The co-occurrence signals (e.g., hand shape, facial expression, and lip pattern) play a critical role in Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR). Compared to RGB data, skeleton data provide a more efficient and concise option, and lay a good foundation for the co-occurrence exploration in CSLR. However, skeleton data are often used as a tool to assist visual grounding and have not attracted sufficient attention. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective GCN-based approach, named CoSign, to incorporate Co-occurrence Signals and explore the potential of skeleton data in CSLR. Specifically, we propose a group-specific GCN to better exploit the knowledge of each signal and a complementary regularization to prevent complex co-adaptation across signals. Furthermore, we propose a two-stream framework that gradually fuses both static and dynamic information in skeleton data. Experimental results on three public CSLR datasets (PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14-T and CSL-Daily) show that the proposed CoSign achieves competitive performance with recent video-based approaches while reducing the computation cost during training.