README.md

---
tags: [sign-language, asl, pytorch, lstm, cnn]
license: mit
metrics:
- accuracy
---

# ASL Recognition Model - Improved ✨

**Improved ASL Recognition** using 1D CNN + Bidirectional LSTM with Attention on MediaPipe landmarks.

## Performance

- **Validation Accuracy**: 64.61% 
- **Improvement**: +438% from baseline (12% → 64.61%)
- **Parameters**: 3,258,574
- **Best Epoch**: 27

## Model Architecture

This improved model uses a hybrid architecture:

1. **1D Convolutional Layers**: Extract spatial features from hand landmarks
   - Conv1D (126 → 128 → 256) with BatchNorm and Dropout
2. **Bidirectional LSTM**: Model temporal dependencies across frames
   - 2 layers, 256 hidden units, bidirectional
3. **Attention Mechanism**: Focus on important frames in the sequence
4. **Classification Head**: 512 → 256 → 77 classes with BatchNorm + Dropout

## Key Improvements

### Phase 1 - Data
✅ Stratified train/val split (80/20) preserving class distribution  
✅ Data augmentation: Gaussian noise on landmarks  
✅ Class-weighted loss to handle any imbalance  

### Phase 2 - Model
✅ 1D CNN for better spatial feature extraction  
✅ Bidirectional LSTM for temporal modeling  
✅ Attention mechanism for frame importance  
✅ BatchNorm for training stability  

### Phase 3 - Training
✅ AdamW optimizer with weight decay (1e-4)  
✅ OneCycleLR scheduler for better convergence  
✅ Gradient clipping (max_norm=1.0)  
✅ Early stopping (patience=15)  
✅ Class-weighted CrossEntropyLoss  

### Phase 4 - Validation
✅ Proper stratified validation split  
✅ No augmentation during validation  
✅ Consistent preprocessing pipeline  

## Vocabulary

- **77 classes**: 26 letters (A-Z) + 51 common words
- **Words**: hello, goodbye, please, thank_you, yes, no, help, sorry, good, bad, friend, family, love, eat, drink, water, food, home, work, school, teacher, student, book, read, write, learn, understand, know, think, feel, want, need, have, go, come, see, hear, speak, sign, time, today, tomorrow, yesterday, morning, afternoon, evening, night, happy, sad, angry, tired

## Training Details

```python
Batch Size: 32
Epochs: 100 (early stopped at 42)
Learning Rate: 1e-3 (OneCycleLR)
Weight Decay: 1e-4
Dropout: 0.3
Train Samples: 6,160
Val Samples: 1,540
```

## Usage

```python
import torch
import numpy as np
from train_asl_improved import ImprovedASLModel

# Load model
model = ImprovedASLModel(num_classes=77)
checkpoint = torch.load('best_model.pth', map_location='cpu')
model.load_state_dict(checkpoint['model_state_dict'])
model.eval()

# Load label encoder
classes = np.load('label_encoder_classes.npy', allow_pickle=True)

# Inference
landmarks = torch.randn(1, 30, 2, 21, 3)  # (batch, seq_len, hands, landmarks, coords)
mask = torch.ones(1, 30)  # Valid frames mask

with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(landmarks, mask)
    pred = torch.argmax(logits, dim=-1)
    print(f"Predicted: {classes[pred.item()]}")
```

## Input Format

- **Shape**: (batch, 30, 2, 21, 3)
  - 30 frames (sequence length)
  - 2 hands (left + right)
  - 21 landmarks per hand (MediaPipe format)
  - 3 coordinates (x, y, z)
- **Normalization**: Landmarks normalized to [-1, 1] range
- **Padding**: Zero-padded sequences with mask support

## Training Results

| Metric | Baseline | Improved | Change |
|--------|----------|----------|--------|
| Val Accuracy | 12.01% | **64.61%** | +52.6% |
| Train Accuracy | ~20% | 72.58% | +52.6% |
| Parameters | 323K | 3.26M | 10x |

## Validation Accuracy Timeline

- Epoch 1: 7.01%
- Epoch 5: 25.13%
- Epoch 10: 48.77%
- Epoch 15: 57.79%
- Epoch 20: 61.17%
- Epoch 27: **64.61%** ← Best
- Epoch 42: 62.40% (early stop)

## Next Steps to Reach 80%+

1. **More Data**: Current 100 samples/class is minimal; collect 300-500 per class
2. **Better Augmentation**: Time warping, speed perturbation, mixup
3. **Ensemble**: Combine multiple models or use test-time augmentation
4. **Architecture**: Try Transformer encoders instead of LSTM
5. **Signer Independence**: Ensure train/val split by signer ID (not done in current dataset)

## Files

- `best_model.pth`: Model checkpoint (37MB)
- `label_encoder_classes.npy`: Class labels mapping
- `model_config.json`: Configuration and metadata
- `training_history.png`: Loss/accuracy plots
- `training_history.npy`: Training metrics

## Citation

If you use this model, please cite:

```bibtex
@misc{asl-recognition-improved,
  title={Improved ASL Recognition with CNN+LSTM},
  author={namratha2412},
  year={2025},
  howpublished={\url{https://huggingface.co/namratha2412/asl-recognition}}
}
```

---

**License**: MIT  
**Dataset**: 7,700 sequences (100 per class)  
**Framework**: PyTorch 2.0+