SignDino: Self-Supervised Sign Language Representation Learning via Temporal-Axis Self-Distillation

Abstract

Self-supervised sign language representation learning must model two properties not central to natural-image SSL: signs are produced by a small set of anatomically distinct articulators, and their meaning depends on the temporal organisation of those articulators. We introduce SignDino, a self-supervised sign-video encoder that moves the DINOv3 student--teacher recipe from the spatial domain of image crops to the temporal domain of tracked sign streams. Each video is decomposed into left-hand, right-hand, and face streams by a detector-first YOLOv8n+ByteTrack pipeline. A frozen DINOv3 ViT-B/16 embeds each per-frame anatomical crop, while lightweight temporal Transformers, not the image backbone, form the student and EMA teacher. They are trained by temporal DINO self-distillation, frame-level masked-token prediction in the style of iBOT, KoLeo feature spreading, and Gram anchoring of the frame-to-frame similarity structure. This design keeps strong image-level visual primitives fixed and learns only how articulator states evolve across time. We evaluate on sign-to-English translation, isolated sign recognition, and fingerspelling detection benchmarks. Across these tasks, SignDino provides a strong public self-supervised representation and shows competitive or state-of-the-art performance under matched downstream evaluation.