SL-Animals-DVS: event-driven sign language animals dataset

Abstract

Non-intrusive visual-based applications supporting the communication of people employing sign language for communication are always an open and attractive research field for the human action recognition community. Automatic sign language interpretation is a complex visual recognition task where motion across time distinguishes the sign being performed. In recent years, the development of robust and successful deep-learning techniques has been accompanied by the creation of a large number of databases. The availability of challenging datasets of Sign Language (SL) terms and phrases helps to push the research to develop new algorithms and methods to tackle their automatic recognition. This paper presents ‘SL-Animals-DVS’, an event-based action dataset captured by a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS). The DVS records non-fluent signers performing a small set of isolated words derived from SL signs of various animals as a continuous spike flow at very low latency. This is especially suited for SL signs which are usually made at very high speeds. We benchmark the recognition performance on this data using three state-of-the-art Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) recognition systems. SNNs are naturally compatible to make use of the temporal information that is provided by the DVS where the information is encoded in the spike times. The dataset has about 1100 samples of 59 subjects performing 19 sign language signs in isolation at different scenarios, providing a challenging evaluation platform for this emerging technology.