Indian Sign Language Recognition
Overview
The Indian Sign Language (ISL) Recognition task focuses on automatically identifying signs performed by a signer and converting them into their corresponding textual meaning. As part of the ARGISL project, we developed a recognition system using a dataset of 2002 commonly used ISL words collected at the Coimbatore campus of RKMVERI. The system leverages computer vision and deep learning techniques to learn visual patterns from sign videos and accurately classify individual signs. To make the recognition process more robust and signer-independent, the model primarily utilizes human pose and hand keypoints extracted from video frames. Our current recognition model achieves approximately 95% accuracy on the collected vocabulary and serves as an important step toward building practical ISL-based communication tools. The long-term vision is to extend the system beyond isolated word recognition to continuous sign language understanding, enabling seamless communication between deaf and hearing individuals. If you like our work, you can support us here.
Demo Applications
As part of the ARGISL project, we have developed a prototype applications to demonstrate how Indian Sign Language recognition can be used in practice.
Record sign video to translate into ISL word/gloss.
Publications
Our research findings have been shared through the related following publications:
📃STARK: Spatio-Temporal Attention for Representation of Keypoints for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Suvajit Patra,
Soumitra Samanta
arXiv, 2026
📃Hierarchical Windowed Graph Attention Transformer Encoder and a Large Scale Dataset for Indian Sign Language Recognition
Suvajit Patra,
Arkadip Maitra,
Megha Tiwari,
K. Kumaran,
Swathy Prabhu,
Swami Punyeshwarananda,
Soumitra Samanta
Springer: Pattern Analysis and Applications, 2025
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank VECC, Kolkata for parly supporting this Indian sign langauge project.
© Copyright 2024-26 by CS, RKMVERI, Belur.
Developed by Suvajit Patra [suvajit.patra.cs20(at)gm.rkmvu.ac.in],
Under the guidance of Dr. Soumitra Samanta [soumitra.samanta(at)gm.rkmvu.ac.in].
All Rights Reserved.