Improved 3D-ResNet sign language recognition algorithm with enhanced hand features

In sign language video, the hand region is small, the resolution is low, the motion speed is fast, and there are cross occlusion and blur phenomena, which have a great impact on sign language recognition rate and speed, and are important factors restricting sign language recognition performance. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an improved 3D-ResNet sign language recognition algorithm with enhanced hand features, aiming to highlight the features of both hands, solve the problem of missing more effective information when relying only on global features, and improve the accuracy of sign language recognition. The proposed method has two improvements. Firstly, the algorithm detects the left and right hand regions based on the improved EfficientDet network, uses the improved Bi-FPN module and dual channel and spatial attention module are used to enhance the detection ability of the network for small targets like hand. Secondly, the improved residual module is used to improve the 3D-ResNet18 network to extract sign language features. The global, the left-hand and the right-hand image sequences are divided into three branches for feature extraction and fusion, so as to strengthen the attention to hand features, strengthen the representation ability of sign language features, and achieve the purpose of improving the accuracy of sign language recognition. In order to verify the performance of this algorithm, a series of experiments are carried out on CSL dataset. For example, in the experiments of hand detection algorithm and sign language recognition algorithm, the performance indicators such as Top-N, mAP, FLOPs and Parm are applied to find the optimal algorithm framework. The experimental results show that the Top1 recognition accuracy of this algorithm reaches 91.12%, which is more than 10% higher than that of C3D, P3D and 3D-ResNet basic networks. From the performance indicators of Top-N, mAP, FLOPs, Parm and so on, the performance of the algorithm in this paper is better than several algorithms in recent three years, such as I3D+BLSTM, B3D ResNet, AM-ResC3D+RCNN and so on. The results show that the hand detection network with enhanced hand features and three-dimensional convolutional neural network proposed in this paper can achieve higher accuracy of sign language recognition.