The dataset includes videos files of the hand gestures of eight words (accident, call, doctor, help, hot, lose, pain, thief) from Indian sign language (ISL), commonly used to communicate during emergency situations. The data is useful for the researchers working on vision based automatic sign language recognition as well as hand gesture recognition.

All the words included in the dataset, except the word doctor are dynamic hand gestures. The videos in this dataset were collected by asking the participants to stand comfortably behind a black colored board and present the hand gestures, in front of the board. A Sony cyber shot DSC-W810 digital camera with 20.1 mega pixel resolution has been used for capturing the videos.

The videos have been collected from 26 individuals including 12 males and 14 females in the age group of 22 to 26 years. Two sample videos have been captured from each participant in an indoor environment under normal lighting conditions by placing the camera at a fixed distance. The dataset is presented in two folders with the original raw video sequences in one folder, and the cropped and downsampled video sequences in the other folder.