The I6-BOSTON50 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-BOSTON50 database for ASL word recognition, we extracted 483 utterances of 50 words from this database. These utterances are segmented manually. You can download them here. The I6-BOSTON50 database consists of 50 sign language words that are listed with the number of occurrences here:

IX_i (37), BUY (31), WHO (25), GIVE (24), WHAT (24), BOOK (23), FUTURE (21), CAN (19), CAR (19), GO (19), VISIT (18), LOVE (16), ARRIVE (15), HOUSE (12), IX_i far (12), POSS (12), SOMETHING/ONE (12), YESTERDAY (12), SHOULD (10), IX-1p (8), WOMAN (8), BOX (7), FINISH (7), NEW (7), NOT (7), HAVE (6), LIKE (6), BLAME (6), BREAK-DOWN (5), PREFER (5), READ (4),COAT (3), CORN (3), LEAVE (3), MAN (3), PEOPLE (3),THINK (3), VEGETABLE (3) VIDEOTAPE (3), BROTHER (2), CANDY (2), FRIEND (2), GROUP (2), HOMEWORK (2), KNOW (2),LEG (2), MOVIE (2), STUDENT (2), TOY (2), WRITE (2)

In I6-BOSTON50, 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:

One important property of this database is the large variability of the utterances for each word. Because of the visual variability of utterances of each word, the sign language recognition systems invariant to the small visual variability of signing can be tested on this database. 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.

List of Publications on I6-BOSTON50 Database

2005

M. Zahedi, D. Keysers, and H. Ney. Pronunciation Clustering and Modeling of Variability for Appearance-Based Sign Language Recognition. In GW 2005, 6th International Workshop on Gesture in Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation, Vannes, France, May 2005. Accepted for publication.
M. Zahedi, D. Keysers, T. Deselaers, and H. Ney. Combination of Tangent Distance and an Image Distortion Model for Appearance-Based Sign Language Recognition. In DAGM 2005, 27th Annual meeting of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, Vienna, Austria, Volume LNCS 3663, pages 401-408, Augest/September 2005.

- 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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