Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison

Vision-based sign language recognition aims at helping the deaf people to communicate with others. However, most existing sign language datasets are limited to a small number of words. Due to the limited vocabulary size, models learned from those datasets cannot be applied in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale Word-Level American Sign Language (WLASL) video dataset, containing more than 2000 words performed by over 100 signers. This dataset will be made publicly available to the research community. To our knowledge,it is by far the largest public ASL dataset to facilitate word-level sign recognition research. Based on this new large-scale dataset, we are able to experiment with several…