# Isolated Sign Language Recognition for Icelandic Sign Language: Experiments in a Low-resource Setting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25862/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-end Sign Language Recognition and Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13830/) (2020)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [MS-ASL: A Large-Scale Data Set and Benchmark for Understanding American Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01053/) (2018)
- [Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05222/) (2021)
- [Quantitative Survey of the State of the Art in Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09918/) (2020)
- [OpenHands: Making Sign Language Recognition Accessible with Pose-based Pretrained Models across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05877/) (2021)
- [pose-format: Library for Viewing, Augmenting, and Handling .pose Files](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09066/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first experiments on isolated sign language recognition (ISLR) for Icelandic Sign Language ('ITM). We use 'ITM SignWiki, a dataset derived from a bilingual Icelandic--'ITM online dictionary. It is genuinely low-resource: 1,845 videos cover 849 classes, 86% of which have only two examples, making the full task effectively one-shot recognition across signers. We compare two open-source ISLR frameworks, OpenHands and SPOTER, on three tasks of increasing vocabulary size (22, 117 and 849 classes), and evaluate three pose estimators and two forms of cross-lingual transfer. With 'ITM data alone, SPOTER outperforms OpenHands on all three tasks, and MediaPipe poses give better results than AlphaPose or SDPose. Cross-lingual transfer brings the largest gains: pretraining SPOTER on American Sign Language data before finetuning on 'ITM raises accuracy by 14--24 percentage points, to 72.7%, 47.9% and 22.6% on the three tasks, and multilingual training with data from six other sign languages lifts OpenHands from 1.41% to 28.86% on the full task. Although far from practical use, the results suggest that transfer from better-resourced sign languages is promising for very low-resource ones. We release our adapted versions of both frameworks.