Research - Sign Language Recognition

Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR)

Developing sign language applications for deaf people can be very important, as many of them, being not able to speak a language, are also not able to read or write a spoken language. Ideally, a translation systems would make it possible to communicate with deaf people. Compared to speech commands, hand gestures are advantageous in noisy environments, in situations where speech commands would be disturbing, as well as for communicating quantitative information and spatial relationships.

A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication made with a part of the body and used instead of verbal communication (or in combination with it). Most people use gestures and body language in addition to words when they speak. A sign language is a language which uses gestures instead of sound to convey meaning combining hand-shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, facial expressions and lip-patterns. Contrary to popular belief, sign language is not international. As with spoken languages, these vary from region to region. They are not completely based on the spoken language in the country of origin.

Sign language is a visual language and consists of 3 major components:

Similar to automatic speech recognition (ASR), we focus in automatic sign language recognition (ASLR) on automatically recognizing sign language videos as gloses, which can be later translated by a statistical machine transaltion system into written text (see a demo video).

ASL sign language demo

Benchmark Databases for Sign Language Recognition and Translation

Automatic sign language recognition databases used at our institute:

If you are interested in using these sign language recognition databases too, please contact Philippe Dreuw.


Some survey papers related to corpora to be used for tracking and recognition benchmarks in sign language recognition:


More publications related to sign language recognition and translation


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Philippe Dreuw
Last modified: 2011-04-07 10:32:01 . Disclaimer. Created Wed Dec 22 18:04:32 CET 2004

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