Multimodal Learning for Sign Language Recognition

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has becoming one of the most important research areas in the field of human computer interaction. SLR systems are meant to automatically translate sign language into text or speech, in order to reduce the communicational gap between deaf and hearing people. The aim of this paper is to exploit multimodal learning techniques for an accurate SLR, making use of data provided by Kinect and Leap Motion. In this regard, single-modality approaches as well as different multimodal methods, mainly based on convolutional neural networks, are proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal learning yields an overall improvement in the sign recognition performance.