Exploration of Sign Language Recognition Methods Based on Improved YOLOv5s

Gesture is a natural and intuitive means of interpersonal communication. Sign language recognition has become a hot topic in scientific research, holding significant importance and research value in fields such as deep learning, human–computer interaction, and pattern recognition. The sign language recognition process needs to ensure real-time performance and ease of deployment. Based on these two requirements, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv5s-based sign language recognition algorithm. Firstly, the lightweight concept from ShuffleNetV2 was applied to achieve lightweight characteristics and improve the model’s deployability. The specific improvements are as follows: The algorithm achieved model size reduction by removing the Focus layer, using the ShuffleNetv2 algorithm, and then channel pruning YOLOv5 at the head of the neck layer. All the convolutional layers and the cross-stage partial bottleneck layer with three convolutional layers in the backbone network were replaced with ShuffleBlock, the spatial pyramid pooling layer and a subsequent cross-stage partial bottleneck layer structure with three convolutional layers were removed, and the cross-stage partial bottleneck layer module with three convolutional layers in the detection header section was replaced with a depth-separable convolutional module. Experimental results show that the parameters of the improved YOLOv5 algorithm decreased from 7.2 M to 0.72 M, and the inference speed decreased from 3.3 ms to 1.1 ms.