Fast Convergence GRU Model for Sign Language Recognition

Recognition of sign language is challenging due to the occlusion of hands, accuracy of hand gestures, and high computational costs. In recent years, deep learning techniques have made significant advances in this field. Although these methods are larger and more complex, they cannot manage long-term sequential data and lack the ability to capture useful information through efficient information processing with faster convergence. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a word-level sign language recognition (SLR) system that combines a real-time human pose detection library with the minimized version of the gated recurrent unit (GRU) model. Each gate unit is optimized by discarding the depth-weighted reset gate in GRU cells and considering only current input. Furthermore, we use sigmoid rather than hyperbolic tangent activation in standard GRUs due to performance loss associated with the former in deeper networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our pose-based optimized GRU (Pose-OGRU) outperforms the standard GRU model in terms of prediction accuracy, convergency, and information processing capability.