BosphorusSign: A Turkish Sign Language Recognition Corpus in Health and Finance Domains

There are as many sign languages as there are deaf communities in the world. Linguists have been collecting corpora of different sign languages and annotating them extensively in order to study and understand their properties. On the other hand, the field of computer vision has approached the sign language recognition problem as a grand challenge and research efforts have intensified in the last 20 years. However, corpora collected for studying linguistic properties are often not suitable for sign language recognition as the statistical methods used in the field require large amounts of data. Recently, with the availability of inexpensive depth cameras, groups from the computer vision community have started collecting corpora with large number of repetitions for sign language recognition research. In this paper, we present the BosphorusSign Turkish Sign Language corpus, which consists of 855 sign and phrase samples from the health, finance and everyday life domains. The corpus is collected using the state-of-the-art Microsoft Kinect v2 depth sensor, and will be the first in this sign language research field. Furthermore, there will be annotations rendered by linguists so that the corpus will appeal both to the linguistic and sign language recognition research communities.