Towards a Lightweight Arabic Sign Language Translation System

There is a pressing need to build a sign-to-text translation system to simplify communication between deaf and non-deaf people. This study investigates the building of a high-performance, lightweight sign language translation system suitable for real-time applications. Two Saudi Sign Language datasets are used for evaluation. We also investigate the effects of the number of signers and number of repetitions in sign language datasets. To this end, eight experiments are conducted in both signer-dependent and signer-independent modes. A comprehensive ablation study is presented to study the impacts of model components, network depth, and the size of the hidden dimension. The best accuracies achieved are 97.7% and 90.7% for the signer-dependent and signer-independent modes, respectively, using the KSU-SSL dataset. Similarly, the model achieves 98.38% and 96.22% for signer-dependent and signer-independent modes using the ArSL dataset.