Tamaththul3D: High-Fidelity 3D Saudi Sign Language Avatars from Monocular Video

Abstract

Existing 3D sign language avatar reconstruction methods are developed and evaluated exclusively on Western sign languages, and no 3D parametric annotations exist for any Arabic Sign Language dataset, a gap that blocks the development of avatar-based accessibility applications for the Arab Deaf community. We release the first SMPL-X parametric annotations for the Ishara-500 Saudi Sign Language dataset, enabling quantitative evaluation and downstream sign language generation for Arabic Sign Language. We introduce Tamaththul3D, a reconstruction pipeline that aligns hand and body estimates through geometric inverse kinematics on the forearm chain followed by 2D-supervised shoulder refinement. The closed-form integration is decoupled from the specific choice of body and hand estimators: any SMPL-X-compatible body estimator and any MANO-compatible hand estimator can be substituted, as we demonstrate by swapping each module independently. Tamaththul3D achieves up to 32% lower hand error than prior methods, runs 32x faster than the strongest baseline, and generalizes across five typologically distinct sign languages without dataset-specific adaptation.