American Sign Language Lexicon Video Dataset (ASLLVD)

This website describes our work at Boston University and the University of Texas at Arlington to develop a large dataset of videos of isolated signs from American Sign Language (ASL). This dataset contains video sequences of thousands of distinct ASL signs (produced by native signers of ASL), along with annotations of those sequences, including start/end frames and class label (i.e., gloss-based identification) of every sign, as well as hand and face locations at every frame.

The data presented here have been collected as part of the NSF funded projects NSF 0705749 and NSF 1059235. This project is a collaboration among:

  • Stan Sclaroff, Professor of Computer Science, Boston University
  • Carol Neidle, Professor of French and Linguistics, Boston University
  • Vassilis Athitsos, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas, Arlington

If you use these data in published work, please cite the following paper discussing the project:

V. Athitsos, C. Neidle, S. Sclaroff, J. Nash, A. Stefan, Q. Yuan and A. Thangali, The ASL Lexicon Video Dataset, CVPR 2008 Workshop on Human Communicative Behaviour Analysis (CVPR4HB'08) (pdf ps)

Datasets

Videos of isolated signs from our capture sessions, with labels based on the glosses found in the Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language, are available from the links below.

Lossless compressed videos are available for three views: front (camera 1 and 4), side (camera 2) and face region (camera 3). QuickTime format (with MPEG4 encoding) videos are available for the first few sessions and will be updated as gloss annotations are prepared.  The lossless compressed videos are about 1Gb each. If you wish to download a large number of these files, please contact us and we can determine a suitable way for data transfer to not overload the fileserver. A C++ library to read frames for this video format is available here.

Native Signer

Sign gloss annotation

Session

Hand/face annotation

QuickTime videos

Lossless compressed videos

Count of signs

Signs (start)

Signs (end)

Lana

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2006_10_10

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

104

 

 

Dana

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2007_05_24

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

102

 

 

Liz

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2008_01_11

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

500

15-fr

come2-fr

ASL_2008_01_18

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

500

come3-fr

frustrate1_single_motion

ASL_2008_02_01

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

500

full1_filled_complete

kite

 

ASL_2008_02_15

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

ASL_2008_02_29

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

ASL_2008_03_28

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

ASL_2008_05_16

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

Tyler

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2008_05_12a

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

500

15-fr

come3-fr

ASL_2008_05_12b

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

200

comfortable

do

ASL_2008_05_29a

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

500

do_work

hot

ASL_2008_05_29b

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

200

hot_dog1

lie2

ASL_2008_06_10

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

230

life

Neat1

 

ASL_2008_05_21

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

Naomi

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2008_08_04

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

450

15-fr

come2-fr

ASL_2008_08_06

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

473

come3-fr

 
frustrate1_single_motion

ASL_2008_08_13

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

333

full1_filled_complete

leaf

ASL_2008_08_13_session2

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

122

learn

material2

 

ASL_2008_10_03

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

 

Student Signer

Sign gloss annotation

Session

Hand/face annotation

QuickTime videos

Lossless compressed videos

Count of signs

Signs (start)

Signs (end)

Chris

 

ASL_2008_04_25a

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

Lisa

 

ASL_2008_04_25b

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

 

 

 

Jaimee

[CSV] [HTM]

ASL_2008_10_10

[TXT]

[MOV]

[VID]

618

A

desert

Related resources

Contacts

For questions regarding data capture and file formats:

athitsos AT uta.edu & sclaroff AT cs.bu.edu

For queries related to sign language and linguistic annotations:

carol AT bu.edu