# Continuous Saudi Sign Language Recognition: A Vision Transformer Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03467 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03467/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [How2Sign: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset for Continuous American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08143/) (2020)
- [ArabSign: A Multi-modality Dataset and Benchmark for Continuous Arabic Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03951/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sign language (SL) is an essential communication form for hearing-impaired and deaf people, enabling engagement within the broader society. Despite its significance, limited public awareness of SL often leads to inequitable access to educational and professional opportunities, thereby contributing to social exclusion, particularly in Saudi Arabia, where over 84,000 individuals depend on Saudi Sign Language (SSL) as their primary form of communication. Although certain technological approaches have helped to improve communication for individuals with hearing impairments, there continues to be an urgent requirement for more precise and dependable translation techniques, especially for Arabic sign language variants like SSL. Most state-of-the-art solutions have primarily focused on non-Arabic sign languages, resulting in a considerable absence of resources dedicated to Arabic sign language, specifically SSL. The complexity of the Arabic language and the prevalence of isolated sign language datasets that concentrate on individual words instead of continuous speech contribute to this issue. To address this gap, our research represents an important step in developing SSL resources. To address this, we introduce the first continuous Saudi Sign Language dataset called KAU-CSSL, focusing on complete sentences to facilitate further research and enable sophisticated recognition systems for SSL recognition and translation. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based model, utilizing a pretrained ResNet-18 for spatial feature extraction and a Transformer Encoder with Bidirectional LSTM for temporal dependencies, achieving 99.02% accuracy at signer dependent mode and 77.71% accuracy at signer independent mode. This development leads the way to not only improving communication tools for the SSL community but also making a substantial contribution to the wider field of sign language.