Isharah-Selfie: Continuous Sign Language Recognition Dataset for One-handed Signing

Overview & Synopsis

Current sign language recognition and translation benchmarks are commonly collected in controlled settings using fixed or studio-style cameras, particularly limiting their ability to reflect how signers communicate in everyday mobile scenarios. As such, this gap becomes increasingly evident when considering the Arabic Sign Language (ArSL), which is a primary sign language used across Arab countries. In this work, we introduce Isharah-Selfie, a large-scale ArSL dataset collected entirely using front-facing smartphone cameras under unconstrained selfie conditions. The dataset comprises 8,997 video clips performed by 16 signers across 1,493 unique sentences, covering several domains such as healthcare, education, and transportation. Unlike conventional datasets dominated by fixed-camera, two-handed signing, Isharah-Selfie captures realistic mobile communication characterized by one-handed signing, close-range viewpoints, partial body visibility, camera motion, unconstrained environments, and heterogeneous device resolutions. Each video is annotated with both gloss sequences for continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) and Arabic sentence translations for sign language translation (SLT). Moreover, we define signer-independent and unseen-sentences evaluation protocols to assess generalization across unseen signers and novel sentence compositions. Extensive benchmarks using RGB-based and pose-based data show that current CSLR and SLT methods remain challenged by selfie-style signing conditions, particularly under unseen-sentence evaluation, where compositional generalization remains weak. By releasing Isharah-Selfie, we aim to support research toward robust, user-centered sign language technologies that operate reliably in realistic smartphone-based communication settings. The Isharah-Selfie dataset is available on https://isharah-selfie.github.io/.