Advanced Arabic Alphabet Sign Language Recognition Using Transfer Learning and Transformer Models

Abstract

This paper presents an Arabic Alphabet Sign Language recognition approach, using deep learning methods in conjunction with transfer learning and transformer-based models. We study the performance of the different variants on two publicly available datasets, namely ArSL2018 and AASL. This task will make full use of state-of-the-art CNN architectures like ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB7, and the latest transformer models such as Google ViT and Microsoft Swin Transformer. These pre-trained models have been fine-tuned on the above datasets in an attempt to capture some unique features of Arabic sign language motions. Experimental results present evidence that the suggested methodology can receive a high recognition accuracy, by up to 99.6% and 99.43% on ArSL2018 and AASL, respectively. That is far beyond the previously reported state-of-the-art approaches. This performance opens up even more avenues for communication that may be more accessible to Arabic-speaking deaf and hard-of-hearing, and thus encourages an inclusive society.