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Geometry-Aware Metric Learning for Cross-Lingual Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition on Static Hand Keypoints

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses the challenge of sign language recognition (SLR) in low-resource settings by proposing a geometry-aware metric learning framework for cross-lingual few-shot learning using static hand keypoints.
  • It introduces a 20-dimensional inter-joint angle descriptor derived from MediaPipe hand keypoints that is invariant to rotation, translation, and scaling, reducing domain shifts caused by different camera perspectives and hand scales.
  • The proposed approach significantly improves accuracy on four diverse fingerspelling alphabets and enables effective frozen cross-lingual transfer, often surpassing within-domain performance, with a lightweight MLP encoder.
  • The results highlight the value of invariant hand-geometry features for building portable and robust SLR systems applicable to languages with scarce annotated data.
  • This method provides a scalable alternative to large labeled corpora by leveraging few-shot transfer learning, thereby advancing practical SLR technology for typologically diverse sign languages.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.09213 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Mar 2026]

Title:Geometry-Aware Metric Learning for Cross-Lingual Few-Shot Sign Language Recognition on Static Hand Keypoints

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Abstract:Sign language recognition (SLR) systems typically require large labeled corpora for each language, yet the majority of the world's 300+ sign languages lack sufficient annotated data. Cross-lingual few-shot transfer, pretraining on a data-rich source language and adapting with only a handful of target-language examples, offers a scalable alternative, but conventional coordinate-based keypoint representations are susceptible to domain shift arising from differences in camera viewpoint, hand scale, and recording conditions. This shift is particularly detrimental in the few-shot regime, where class prototypes estimated from only K examples are highly sensitive to extrinsic variance. We propose a geometry-aware metric-learning framework centered on a compact 20-dimensional inter-joint angle descriptor derived from MediaPipe static hand keypoints. These angles are invariant to SO(3) rotation, translation, and isotropic scaling, eliminating the dominant sources of cross-dataset shift and yielding tighter, more stable class prototypes. Evaluated on four fingerspelling alphabets spanning typologically diverse sign languages, ASL, LIBRAS, Arabic Sign Language, and Thai Sign Language, the proposed angle features improve over normalized-coordinate baselines by up to 25 percentage points within-domain and enable frozen cross-lingual transfer that frequently exceeds within-domain accuracy, using a lightweight MLP encoder with about 10^5 parameters. These findings demonstrate that invariant hand-geometry descriptors provide a portable and effective foundation for cross-lingual few-shot SLR in low-resource settings.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.09213 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.09213v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.09213
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Chayanin Chamachot [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Mar 2026 05:31:46 UTC (262 KB)
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