MSE-GCN: A Multiscale Spatiotemporal Feature Aggregation Enhanced Efficient Graph Convolutional Network for Dynamic Sign Language Recognition

Graph convolution networks have emerged as an active area of research for skeleton-based sign language recognition (SLR). One essential problem in this approach is to efficiently extract the most discriminative features capable of modeling short-range and long-range spatial and temporal information over all skeleton joints while ensuring low inference costs. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-scale efficient graph convolutional network (MSE-GCN) for skeleton-based SLR. The proposed network makes use of separable convolution layers set in a multi-scale setting and embedded in a multi branch (MB) network along with an early fusion scheme, resulting in an accurate, computationally efficient, and faster system. In addition, we have proposed a novel hybrid attention module, named Spatial Temporal Joint Part attention (ST-JPA) to distinguish the most important body parts as well as most informative joints in the specific frames from the whole sign sequence. The performance of proposed network (MSE-GCN) is evaluated on five challenging sign language datasets, WLASL-100, WLASL-300, WLASL-1000, MINDS-Libras, and LIBRAS-UFOP achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracies of 85.27%, 81.59%, 71.75%, 97.442 ± 1.01%, and 88.59±3.60%, respectively while incurring lower computational costs.