SignMusketeers: An Efficient Multi-Stream Approach for Sign Language Translation at Scale

Abstract

A persistent challenge in sign language video processing, including the task of sign language to written language translation, is how we train efficient model given the nature of videos. Informed by the nature and linguistics of signed languages, our proposed method focuses on just the most relevant parts in a signing video: the face, hands and body posture of the signer. However, instead of using pose estimation coordinates from off-the-shelf pose tracking models, which have inconsistent performance for hands and faces, we propose to learn the complex handshapes and rich facial expressions of sign languages in a self-supervised fashion. Our approach is based on learning from individual frames (rather than video sequences) and is therefore much more efficient than prior work on sign language pre-training. Compared to a recent model trained on publicly avaiable data that established a new state of the art in sign language translation on the How2Sign dataset, our approach yields similar translation performance, using less than 3% of the compute.