Signing at Scale: Learning to Co-Articulate Signs for Large-Scale Photo-Realistic Sign Language Production

Abstract

Sign languages are visual languages, with vocabularies as rich as their spoken language counterparts. However, current deep-learning based Sign Language Production (SLP) models produce under-articulated skeleton pose sequences from constrained vocabularies and this limits applicability. To be understandable and accepted by the deaf, an automatic SLP system must be able to generate co-articulated photo-realistic signing sequences for large domains of discourse. In this work, we tackle large-scale SLP by learning to co-articulate between dictionary signs, a method capable of producing smooth signing while scaling to unconstrained domains of discourse. To learn sign co-articulation, we propose a novel Frame Selection Network (FS-NET) that improves the temporal alignment of interpolated dictionary signs to continuous signing sequences. Additionally, we propose SIGNGAN, a pose-conditioned human synthesis model that produces photo-realistic sign language videos direct from skeleton pose. We propose a novel keypoint-based loss function which improves the quality of synthe-sized hand images. We evaluate our SLP model on the large-scale meineDGS (mDGS) corpus, conducting extensive user evaluation showing our FS-NET approach improves coarticulation of interpolated dictionary signs. Additionally, we show that SIGNGAN significantly outperforms all baseline methods for quantitative metrics, human perceptual studies and native deaf signer comprehension.