SignAvatars: A Large-scale 3D Sign Language Holistic Motion Dataset and Benchmark

Zhengdi Yu^1,2 · Shaoli Huang² · Yongkang Cheng² · Tolga Birdal¹

¹Imperial College London, ²Tencent AI Lab

ECCV 2024

SignAvatars is the first large-scale 3D sign language holistic motion dataset with mesh annotations, which comprises 8.34M precise 3D whole-body SMPL-X annotations, covering 70K motion sequences. The corresponding MANO hand version is also provided.

News 🚩

• [2024/12/4] [Paper] Visualization code is now provided. ⭐
• [2023/11/2] Paper is now available. ⭐

TODO

• Initial release of annotations.
• Release the visualization code.
• Enrich the dataset

Application examples on SLP

SLP from HamNoSys	SLP from Word
SLP from ASL	SLP from GSL

Instruction 📜

Dataset description

Dataset download

For annotations, please fill out this form to request access to use SignAvatars for non-commercial research purposes. By submitting the form, you have read and agree to the terms of the Data license and you will receive an email and please download the motion and text labels from the provided downloading links.

We do not distribute the original RGB videos due to license. We provide high-quality 3D motion labels annotated by our team. For the original video download of the 4 subsets, please follow the instructions below:

1. For ASL subset, please download Green Screen RGB clips from how2sign dataset and put into language2motion/.
2. For HamNoSys subset, please download the original videos using the data.json from the downloaded HamNoSys/data.json.
3. For GSL subset, please follow the official instruction to download and put into language2motion/.
4. For Word subset, please follow the official instruction to download and put into word2motion/.

Dataset Structure

After downloading the data, please construct the layout of dataset/ as follows:

|-- dataset
|   |-- hamnosys2motion/  
|   |   |-- images/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/
|   |   |   |   |-- <frame_number.jpg>   [ starts from 000000.jpg ]
|   |   |-- videos/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/  [ ..... ]   
|   |   |-- annotations/
|   |   |   |-- <annotation_type>  [ SMPL-X, MANO, ...]
|   |   |   |   |-- <video_name.pkl>
|   |   |-- data.json  [Text annotations]
|   |   |-- split.pkl
|   |   |
|   |-- language2motion/  
|   |   |-- images/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/
|   |   |   |   |-- <frame_number.jpg>   [ starts from 000000.jpg ]
|   |   |-- videos/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/  [ ..... ]   
|   |   |-- annotations/
|   |   |   |-- <annotation_type>  [ SMPL-X, MANO, ...]
|   |   |   |   |-- <video_name.pkl>
|   |   |-- text/
|   |   |   |-- how2sign_train.csv   [Text annotations]
|   |   |   |-- how2sign_test.csv    [Text annotations]
|   |   |   |-- how2sign_val.csv     [Text annotations]
|   |   |   |-- PHOENIX-2014-T.train.corpus.csv     [Text annotations]
|   |   |   |-- PHOENIX-2014-T.test.corpus.csv     [Text annotations]
|   |   |
|   |-- word2motion/  
|   |   |-- images/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/
|   |   |   |   |-- <frame_number.jpg>   [ starts from 000000.jpg ]
|   |   |-- videos/
|   |   |   |-- <video_name>/  [ ..... ]   
|   |   |-- annotations/
|   |   |   |-- <annotation_type>  [ SMPL-X, MANO, ...]
|   |   |   |   |-- <video_name.pkl>
|   |   |-- text/
|   |   |   |-- WLASL_v0.3.json   [Text annotations]
|   |   |
|-- common
|   |-- utils
|   |   |-- human_model_files
|   |   |   |-- smpl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPL_NEUTRAL.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPL_MALE.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPL_FEMALE.pkl
|   |   |   |-- smplx
|   |   |   |   |-- MANO_SMPLX_vertex_ids.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPL-X__FLAME_vertex_ids.npy
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPLX_NEUTRAL.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPLX_to_J14.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPLX_NEUTRAL.npz
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPLX_MALE.npz
|   |   |   |   |-- SMPLX_FEMALE.npz
|   |   |   |-- mano
|   |   |   |   |-- MANO_LEFT.pkl
|   |   |   |   |-- MANO_RIGHT.pkl

In common/ folder, human_model_files contains smpl, smplx, mano, and flame 3D model files. Download the files from [SMPL_NEUTRAL] [SMPL_MALE.pkl and SMPL_FEMALE.pkl] [smplx] [SMPLX_to_J14.pkl] [mano]. Alternatively, you can directly download our packed model files from Dropbox and unzip to human_model_files.

Data Description

SMPL-X Annotation

In each of the .pkl files, the keys are in the format:

width, height: (1,) (1,) the video width and height
focal: (num_frames, 2)
princpt: (num_frames, 2)
2d: (num_frames, 106, 3)
pred2d: (num_frames, 106, 3)
total_valid_index: (num_frames,)
left_valid: (num_frames,)
right_valid: (num_frames,)
bb2img_trans: (num_frames, 2, 3)
smplx: (num_frames, 182)
unsmooth_smplx: (num_frames, 169)

For motion generation and motion prior learning tasks, you should use the data in smplx for better stability, whilst unsmooth_smplx can be used for pose estimation tasks. Please refer to code for more details. For example, you can extract smplx parameters as follow:

all_parameters = results_dict['smplx']
root_pose, body_pose, left_hand_pose, right_hand_pose, jaw_pose, shape, expression, cam_trans = \
all_parameters[:, :3], all_parameters[:, 3:66], all_parameters[:, 66:111], all_parameters[:, 111:156], \
all_parameters[:, 156:159], all_parameters[:, 159:169], all_parameters[:, 169:179], all_parameters[:, 179:182]

all_parameters = results_dict['unsmooth_smplx']
root_pose, body_pose, lhand_pose, rhand_pose, shape, cam_trans = \
all_parameters[:, :3], all_parameters[:, 3:66], all_parameters[:, 66:111], all_parameters[:, 111:156], \
all_parameters[:, 156:166], all_parameters[:, 166:169]

root_pose: (num_frames, 3)
body_pose: (num_frames, 63)
expression: (num_frames, 10)
jaw_pose: (num_frames, 3)
betas: (num_frames, 10)
left_hand_pose: (num_frames, 45)
right_hand_pose: (num_frames, 45)

Please note that the transl is set to 0 in these subsets as there is no root position change in the video.

Text Annotations

HamNoSys2Motion

• The signers are standing and doing a single sign.
• Each video is annotated with hamnosys glyph and hamnosys text:
  • "hamsymmlr,hamflathand,hamextfingero,hampalml"
• The average length of the video is 60 frames with 24 fps

Language2Motion

• The signers are sitting and doing multiple signs.
• Each video is annotated with natural language translations:
  • "So we're going to start again on this one."
• The average length of the video is 162 frames with 24 fps

Word2Motion

• The signers are standing and doing a single sign.
• Each video is annotated with word-level English:
• The average length of the video is 57 frames with 24 fps

Getting Started & Visualization

Installation

Using the virtual environment by running:

conda create -n signavatars python==3.8.8  
conda activate signavatars
conda install -n signavatars pytorch==1.10.0 torchvision==0.11.1 cudatoolkit=10.2 -c pytorch
pip install -r requirements.txt

Visualize SMPL-X Annotations with pyrender (No need to download videos)

Alternatively, youcan can visualize .pkl from our dataset.

python vis.py \
--pkl_file_path <path_to_pkl_folder/file> \

This will render the motion with its text annotation. Then, the results will be saved in ./render_results/:

Visualize SMPL-X Annotations Overlay on Raw Videos with pyrender

To visualize the motion overlay on the image, you need to first download the videos and run:

python vis.py \
--pkl_file_path <path_to_pkl_folder/file> \
--video_path <path_to_video_folder>
--overlay

Then, the results will be saved in ./render_results_overlay/ (default shape here):

Citation

@inproceedings{yu2024signavatars,
  title={SignAvatars: A large-scale 3D sign language holistic motion dataset and benchmark},
  author={Yu, Zhengdi and Huang, Shaoli and Cheng, Yongkang and Birdal, Tolga},
  booktitle={European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
  pages={1--19},
  year={2024}
}

Contact

For technical questions, please contact ZhengdiYu@hotmail.com or z.yu23@imperial.ac.uk. For license, please contact shaolihuang@tencent.com.