Sunuwar Jhuma, Borah Samarjeet, Kharga Aditi
Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim Manipal University, Sikkim, 737136, India.
Data Brief. 2024 Jan 23;53:110080. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2024.110080. eCollection 2024 Apr.
Nepali Sign Language (NSL) is used by the Nepali-speaking community in Nepal and in Indian states such as Sikkim, the hilly region of North Bengal, some parts of Uttarakhand, Meghalaya, and Assam. It consists of the International Manual Alphabet (A-Z), Nepali consonants, vowels, conjunct letters, and numbers represented in the form of one-handed fingerspelling or Nepali manual alphabet. The standard gestures for NSL have been published by the Nepal National Federation of the Deaf & Hard of Hearing (NFDH). To learn Nepali Sign Language, the first step is to understand its alphabet set. The use of technology can help ease the learning process. One of the application areas of computer vision is translating sign language gestures to either text or audio to facilitate communication. This is an open research area. However, NSL translation is one of the less explored research areas because there is no dataset available to work on for NSL. This paper introduces the Nepali Sign Language Dataset (NSL23), which is the first of its kind and includes vowels and consonants of the Nepali Sign Language alphabet. The dataset consists of .mov videos performed by 14 volunteers who have demonstrated 36 consonant signs and 13 vowel signs either in one full video or character by character. The dataset has been prepared under various conditions, including normal lighting, dark lighting conditions, prepared environments, unprepared environments, and real-world environments. The volunteers who performed the NSL gesture have been classified as 9 beginners who are using NSL for the first time and 5 experts who have been using NSL for 5 to 25 years. NSL23 contains 630 total videos representing 1205 gestures. The dataset can be used to train machine learning models to classify the alphabet set of NSL and further develop a sign language translator.
尼泊尔手语（NSL）被尼泊尔讲尼泊尔语的群体以及印度的一些邦使用，如锡金邦、北孟加拉的山区、北阿坎德邦的一些地区、梅加拉亚邦和阿萨姆邦。它由国际手语字母表（A - Z）、尼泊尔语辅音、元音、连缀字母以及以单手手指拼写或尼泊尔手语字母形式表示的数字组成。尼泊尔聋人与重听人全国联合会（NFDH）已发布了尼泊尔手语的标准手势。要学习尼泊尔手语，第一步是了解其字母表。技术的使用有助于简化学习过程。计算机视觉的应用领域之一是将手语手势翻译成文本或音频以促进交流。这是一个开放的研究领域。然而，尼泊尔手语翻译是较少被探索的研究领域之一，因为没有可用于尼泊尔手语研究的数据集。本文介绍了尼泊尔手语数据集（NSL23），这是同类数据集中的首个，包含了尼泊尔手语字母表中的元音和辅音。该数据集由14名志愿者表演的.mov视频组成，这些志愿者在一个完整视频中或逐个字符地展示了36个辅音手势和13个元音手势。该数据集是在各种条件下准备的，包括正常照明、暗光条件、准备好的环境、未准备好的环境以及真实世界环境。表演尼泊尔手语手势的志愿者被分为9名首次使用尼泊尔手语的初学者和5名使用尼泊尔手语5至25年的专家。NSL23总共包含630个视频，代表1205个手势。该数据集可用于训练机器学习模型以对尼泊尔手语的字母表进行分类，并进一步开发手语翻译器。
