The I6-BOSTON201 Database

The National Center for sign language and Gesture Resources of the Boston University published a database of ASL sentences. Although this database has not been produced primarily for image processing research, it consists of 201 annotated video streams of ASL sentences.

The signing is captured simultaneously by four standard stationary cameras where three of them are black/white and one is a color camera. Two black/white cameras, placed towards the signer's face, form a stereo pair and another camera is installed on the side of the signer. The color camera is placed between the stereo camera pair and is zoomed to capture only the face of the signer. The movies published on the internet are at 30 frames per second and the size of the frames is 312*242 pixels. We use the published video streams at the same frame rate but we use only the upper center part of size 195*165 pixels because parts of the bottom of the frames show some information about the frame and the left and right border of the frames are unused.

To create I6-BOSTON201 database for ASL sentence recognition, we separated the video streams to training and test set which the training set consists of 161 sign language sentences and the test set includes 40 remaining sign language sentences. You can download the training and test set containing the image frames of the movies and their annotation files here.

	Training Set	Test Set
Sentences	161	40
Running Words	710	178
Vocabulary	119	78

In I6-BOSTON201, there are three signers: one male and two female signers. All of the signers are dressed differently and the brightness of their clothes is different. We use the frames captured by two of the four cameras, one camera of the stereo camera pair in front of the signer and the other lateral. Using both of the stereo cameras and the color camera may be useful in stereo and facial expression recognition, respectively. Both of the used cameras are in fixed positions and capture the videos in a controlled environment simultaneously. The signers and the views of the cameras are shown here:

We hope that other research groups use this database and publish their results. This database is freely available and you can use it as you desire. If you use it, please cite this web page and source database created in the Boston University.

- Morteza Zahedi, Lehrstuhl für Informatik VI | zahedi@i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de -
Lehrstuhl für Informatik VI, Computer Science Department, RWTH Aachen University, D-52056 Aachen, Germany
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