The American Sign Language Lexicon Video Dataset

The lack of a written representation for American Sign Language (ASL) makes it difficult to do something as com- monplace as looking up an unknown word in a dictionary. The majority of printed dictionaries organize ASL signs (represented in drawings or pictures) based on their neares t English translation; so unless one already knows the mean- ing of a sign, dictionary look-up is not a simple proposition . In this paper we introduce the ASL Lexicon Video Dataset, a large and expanding public dataset containing video se- quences of thousands of distinct ASL signs, as well as anno- tations of those sequences, including start/end frames and class label of every sign. This dataset is being created as part of a project to develop a computer vision system that allows users to look up the meaning of an ASL sign. At the same time, the dataset can be useful for benchmarking a variety of computer vision and machine learning meth- ods designed for learning and/or indexing a large number of visual classes, and especially approaches for analyzing gestures and human communication.