A Comparison of Small Sample Methods for Handshape Recognition

Automatic Sign Language Translation (SLT) systems can be a great asset to improve the communication with and within deaf communities. Currently, the main issue preventing effective translation models lays in the low availability of labelled data, which hinders the use of modern deep learning models. SLT is a complex problem that involves many subtasks, of which hand -shape recognition is the most important. We compare a series of models specially tailored for small datasets to improve their performance on handshape recogni-tion tasks. We evaluate Wide-DenseNet and few-shot Prototypical Network models with and without trans-fer learning, and also using Model-Agnostic Meta -Learning (MAML). Our findings indicate that Wide-DenseNet without transfer learning and Prototipical Networks with transfer learning provide the best re-sults. Prototypical networks, particularly, are vastly superior when using less than 30 samples, while Wide-DenseNet achieves the best results with more samples. On the other hand, MAML does not improve perfor-mance in any scenario. These results can help to design better SLT models.