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Vision-based sign language recognition has attracted more and more interest from researchers in the computer vision field. In this article, we propose a novel algorithm to model and recognize sign language performed in front of a Microsoft Kinect sensor. Under the assumption that some frames are expected to be both discriminative and representative in a sign language video, we first assign a binary latent variable to each frame in training videos for indicating its discriminative capability, then develop a latent support vector machine model to classify the signs, as well as localize the discriminative and representative frames in each video. In addition, we utilize the depth map together with the color image captured by the Kinect sensor to obtain a more effective and accurate feature to enhance the recognition accuracy. To evaluate our approach, we conducted experiments on both word-level sign language and sentence-level sign language. An American Sign Language dataset including approximately 2,000 word-level sign language phrases and 2,000 sentence-level sign language phrases was collected using the Kinect sensor, and each phrase contains color, depth, and skeleton information. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for sign language recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]