Paper Detail

Recognizing Co-Speech Gestures in-the-Wild

Sindhu B Hegde, K R Prajwal, Andrew Zisserman

arxiv Score 7.8

Published 2026-05-29 · First seen 2026-06-01

General AI

Abstract

While humans naturally gesture during speech, only a sparse subset of these movements are visually depictive and semantically linked to specific spoken words. Current multimodal models struggle to capture these semantic co-speech gestures, heavily bottlenecked by a lack of precisely annotated training data. To address this, we introduce the Gesture Recognition in the Wild (GRW) dataset, the first large-scale benchmark designed to map unconstrained human gestures to specific words with frame-accurate temporal boundaries. Comprising 156,688 manually annotated video clips, GRW spans a highly diverse 150-word taxonomy of physical actions, spatial descriptors, and abstract concepts. We leverage GRW to train video models to (a) classify gestures as semantic or not, (b) recognize the word corresponding to a co-speech gesture, and (c) temporally localize the gesture. We also use GRW to establish benchmarks for these three tasks.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{hegde2026recognizing,
  title = {Recognizing Co-Speech Gestures in-the-Wild},
  author = {Sindhu B Hegde and K R Prajwal and Andrew Zisserman},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {While humans naturally gesture during speech, only a sparse subset of these movements are visually depictive and semantically linked to specific spoken words. Current multimodal models struggle to capture these semantic co-speech gestures, heavily bottlenecked by a lack of precisely annotated training data. To address this, we introduce the Gesture Recognition in the Wild (GRW) dataset, the first large-scale benchmark designed to map unconstrained human gestures to specific words with frame-accu},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31589},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2605.31589},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}