SIGNUM Database: Video Corpus for Signer-Independent Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Research in the field of continuous sign language recognition has not yet addressed the problem of interpersonal variance in signing. Applied to signer-independent tasks, current recognition systems show poor performance as their training bases upon corpora with an insufficient number of signers. In contrast to speech recognition, there is actually no benchmark which meets the requirements for signer-independent continuous sign language recognition. Because of this absence we created a new sign language corpus based on a vocabulary of 450 basic signs in German Sign Language (DGS). The corpus comprises 780 sentences each performed by 25 native signers of different sexes and ages. This database is now available for all interested researchers.