mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Quantitative Survey of the State of the Art in Sign Language Recognition

arXiv 2008.09918 ↗First posted 22 Aug 2020cs.CVcited by 50

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Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents a meta study covering around 300 published sign language recognition papers with over 400 experimental results. It includes most papers between the start of the field in 1983 and 2020. Additionally, it covers a fine-grained analysis on over 25 studies that have compared their recognition approaches on RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, the standard benchmark task of the field. Research in the domain of sign language recognition has progressed significantly in the last decade, reaching a point where the task attracts much more attention than ever before. This study compiles the state of the art in a concise way to help advance the field and reveal open questions. Moreover, all of this meta study's source data is made public, easing future work with it and further expansion. The analyzed papers have been manually labeled with a set of categories. The data reveals many insights, such as, among others, shifts in the field from intrusive to non-intrusive capturing, from local to global features and the lack of non-manual parameters included in medium and larger vocabulary recognition systems. Surprisingly, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather with a vocabulary of 1080 signs represents the only resource for large vocabulary continuous sign language recognition benchmarking world wide.

Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 10; 2022: 10; 2023: 6; 2024: 10; 2025: 7; 2026: 7.

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  1. 2022Two-Stream Network for Sign Language Recognition and Translationcited by 122
  2. 2021Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processingcited by 67
  3. 2022Signing at Scale: Learning to Co-Articulate Signs for Large-Scale Photo-Realistic Sign Language Productioncited by 61
  4. 2021SignBERT: Pre-Training of Hand-Model-Aware Representation for Sign Language Recognitioncited by 59
  5. 2023SignBERT+: Hand-model-aware Self-supervised Pre-training for Sign Language Understandingcited by 59
  6. 2021Mixed SIGNals: Sign Language Production via a Mixture of Motion Primitivescited by 50
  7. 2021Stochastic Transformer Networks with Linear Competing Units: Application to end-to-end SL Translationcited by 35
  8. 2023ASL Citizen: A Community-Sourced Dataset for Advancing Isolated Sign Language Recognitioncited by 34
  9. 2021Content4All Open Research Sign Language Translation Datasetscited by 30
  10. 2021OpenHands: Making Sign Language Recognition Accessible with Pose-based Pretrained Models across Languagescited by 30
  11. 2021Aligning Subtitles in Sign Language Videoscited by 26
  12. 2023SignDiff: Diffusion Model for American Sign Language Productioncited by 25
38 more
  1. 2022Sign Language Video Retrieval with Free-Form Textual Queriescited by 21
  2. 2022Automatic dense annotation of large-vocabulary sign language videoscited by 20
  3. 2024Scaling up Multimodal Pre-training for Sign Language Understandingcited by 20
  4. 2024Discrete to Continuous: Generating Smooth Transition Poses from Sign Language Observationcited by 16
  5. 2024Sign-IDD: Iconicity Disentangled Diffusion for Sign Language Productioncited by 16
  6. 2024MASA: Motion-aware Masked Autoencoder with Semantic Alignment for Sign Language Recognitioncited by 13
  7. 2021Using Motion History Images with 3D Convolutional Networks in Isolated Sign Language Recognitioncited by 12
  8. 2022Improving Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Consistency Constraints and Signer Removalcited by 11
  9. 2021Sign Segmentation with Changepoint-Modulated Pseudo-Labellingcited by 10
  10. 2021ChaLearn LAP Large Scale Signer Independent Isolated Sign Language Recognition Challenge: Design, Results and Future Researchcited by 10
  11. 2023Human Part-wise 3D Motion Context Learning for Sign Language Recognitioncited by 8
  12. 2024A Methodological and Structural Review of Hand Gesture Recognition Across Diverse Data Modalitiescited by 8
  13. 2022ArabSign: A Multi-modality Dataset and Benchmark for Continuous Arabic Sign Language Recognitioncited by 7
  14. 2024Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Spatial-Temporal Consistency for Sign Language Recognitioncited by 6
  15. 2022WLASL-LEX: a Dataset for Recognising Phonological Properties in American Sign Languagecited by 5
  16. 2022LSA-T: The first continuous Argentinian Sign Language dataset for Sign Language Translationcited by 4
  17. 2024TCNet: Continuous Sign Language Recognition from Trajectories and Correlated Regionscited by 4
  18. 2022Multi-scale temporal network for continuous sign language recognitioncited by 3
  19. 2023A Survey on Deep Multi-modal Learning for Body Language Recognition and Generationcited by 3
  20. 20243D-LEX v1.0: 3D Lexicons for American Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlandscited by 3
  21. 2025SignX: Continuous Sign Recognition in Compact Pose-Rich Latent Spacecited by 3
  22. 2022Neural Sign Reenactor: Deep Photorealistic Sign Language Retargetingcited by 2
  23. 2024SignLLM: Sign Language Production Large Language Modelscited by 2
  24. 2024The NGT200 Dataset: Geometric Multi-View Isolated Sign Recognitioncited by 2
  25. 2023Toward American Sign Language Processing in the Real World: Data, Tasks, and Methodscited by 1
  26. 2025Transfer Learning from Visual Speech Recognition to Mouthing Recognition in German Sign Languagecited by 1
  27. 2025The Importance of Facial Features in Vision-based Sign Language Recognition: Eyes, Mouth or Full Face?cited by 1
  28. 2025Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language Translationcited by 1
  29. 2025StgcDiff: Spatial-Temporal Graph Condition Diffusion for Sign Language Transition Generationcited by 0
  30. 2025Hybrid Autoregressive-Diffusion Model for Real-Time Sign Language Productioncited by 0
  31. 2025Bringing Balance to Hand Shape Classification: Mitigating Data Imbalance Through Generative Modelscited by 0
  32. 2026How Do Lexical Senses Correspond Between Spoken German and German Sign Language?cited by 0
  33. 2026VGGT-HPE: Reframing Head Pose Estimation as Relative Pose Predictioncited by 0
  34. 2026SignVerse-2M: A Two-Million-Clip Pose-Native Universe of 55+ Sign Languagescited by 0
  35. 2026Emotion Recognition in Sign Language Conversationcited by 0
  36. 2026Sign Language Recognition Using Original and Synthetic Depth Image Based Point Cloud Data Modelscited by 0
  37. 2026Gloss-Free Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset Sign Spottingcited by 0
  38. 2026Isolated Sign Language Recognition for Icelandic Sign Language: Experiments in a Low-resource Settingcited by 0