The CogVis Lab develops vision and language models that understand, translate, and produce sign languages — bridging communication between Deaf and hearing communities through gloss-free translation, avatar-driven production, and LLM-powered annotation.
We work at the intersection of computer vision, natural language processing, and accessibility to build systems that understand and generate sign languages.
Gloss-free, end-to-end translation of continuous sign language video into spoken language text using visual transformers and large language models.
Generating natural, diverse sign language video from spoken text via motion tokenisation, sparse keyframe learning, and photorealistic avatar synthesis.
Detecting and disambiguating individual signs in unconstrained continuous video, including fingerspelling and rare or out-of-vocabulary signs.
Leveraging agentic large language models for linguistically grounded sign annotation, dataset curation, and multilingual sign language understanding.
We publish at top venues in computer vision and machine learning. See all on Google Scholar →
Norfolk Deaf Festival — Prof. Richard Bowden will deliver an invited talk and join a panel at the Norfolk Deaf Festival.
Generative AI for Sign Language Workshop (CVPR 2026) — Prof. Richard Bowden gave an invited keynote on AI translation of sign languages.
Deaf Expo / BDA Conference — SignGPT exhibited at the British Deaf Association Conference, 15–16 May 2026.
Harry Walsh and Ryan Wong has graduated with PhDs! Congratulations to Harry and Ryan on successfully defending their theses and earning their doctorates.
IET Surrey Lecture — Prof. Richard Bowden delivered an invited lecture on AI translation between sign and spoken language, 14 January 2026.
BMVA Technical Meeting — AI for Sign Language Translation, Production & Linguistics — one-day scientific meeting, 10 December 2025.
Deaf in AI & Technology Workshop — Hosted by UCL DCAL, bringing together researchers and Deaf community stakeholders, 9 December 2025.
MSLR Workshop at ICCV 2025 — Prof. Richard Bowden gave a keynote on automatic translation of sign languages, 20 October 2025.
Oxford Deaf Festival — Prof. Richard Bowden joined as a panel member, 26–27 September 2025.
BDA Conference — SignGPT exhibited with a stall and sponsorship at the British Deaf Association Conference, 17–18 July 2025.
SLRTP Workshop at CVPR 2025 — 3rd Workshop on Sign Language Recognition, Translation and Production, co-organised by the team, 12 June 2025.
SignGPT project launched! We are excited to announce the launch of SignGPT, our new initiative focused on leveraging large language models for sign language understanding and generation. Stay tuned for updates on our research and developments in this area.