SegSLR: Promptable Video Segmentation for Isolated Sign Language Recognition

Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) approaches primarily rely on RGB data or signer pose information. However, combining these modalities often results in the loss of crucial details, such as hand shape and orientation, due to imprecise representations like bounding boxes. Therefore, we propose the ISLR system SegSLR, which combines RGB and pose information through promptable zero-shot video segmentation. Given the rough localization of the hands and the signer's body from pose information, we segment the respective parts through the video to maintain all relevant shape information. Subsequently, the segmentations focus the processing of the RGB data on the most relevant body parts for ISLR. This effectively combines RGB and pose information. Our evaluation on the complex ChaLearn249 IsoGD dataset shows that SegSLR outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, ablation studies indicate that SegSLR strongly benefits from focusing on the signer's body and hands, justifying our design choices.