Multimodal Minimal-Angular-Geometry Representation for Real-Time Dynamic Mexican Sign Language Recognition

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Authors: Gerardo Garcia-Gil, Gabriela del Carmen López-Armas, Yahir Emmanuel Ramirez-Pulido
Cited by: 1
References: 66

Abstract

Current approaches to dynamic sign language recognition commonly rely on dense landmark representations, which impose high computational cost and hinder real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this limitation, this work proposes a computationally efficient framework for real-time dynamic Mexican Sign Language (MSL) recognition based on a multimodal minimal angular-geometry representation. Instead of processing complete landmark sets (e.g., MediaPipe Holistic with up to 468 keypoints), the proposed method encodes the relational geometry of the hands, face, and upper body into a compact set of 28 invariant internal angular descriptors. This representation substantially reduces feature dimensionality and computational complexity while preserving linguistically relevant manual and non-manual information required for grammatical and semantic discrimination in MSL. A real-time end-to-end pipeline is developed, comprising multimodal landmark extraction, angular feature computation, and temporal modeling using a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network. The system is evaluated on a custom dataset of dynamic MSL gestures acquired under controlled real-time conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves 99% accuracy and 99% macro F1-score, matching state-of-the-art performance while using fewer features dramatically. The compactness, interpretability, and efficiency of the minimal angular descriptor make the proposed system suitable for real-time deployment on low-cost devices, contributing toward more accessible and inclusive sign language recognition technologies.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Hand Gesture Recognition Systems Face recognition and analysis Hearing Impairment and Communication

Publication details

Journal / source
Technologies
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
14
Issue
1
Pages
48–48
Publication date
8 January 2026
Language
EN