Motion Recognition in Bharatanatyam Dance

Abstract

This paper provides a method to understand the underlying semantics of <i>Bharatnatyam</i> dance motion and classifies it. Each dance performance is audio-driven and spans over space and time. The dance is captured and analyzed, which is helpful in cultural heritage preservation, and tutoring systems to assist the naive learner. This paper attempts to solve the fundamental problem; recognizing the motions during a dance performance based on motion-pattern. The used dataset is the video recordings of an Indian Classical Dance form known as <i>Bharatanatyam</i>. The different <i>Adavus</i> (The basic unit of Bharatanatyam) of <i>Bharatanatyam</i> dance are captured using Kinect. We choose RGB from various forms of captured data (RGB, Depth, and Skeleton). Motion History Image (MHI) and Histogram of Gradient of MHI (HoGMHI) are computed for each motion and used as an input for the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to recognize motion. The paper explores two ML techniques; Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The overall accuracy of both the classifiers is more than 90%. The novelties of the work are (a) analysing all possible involved motions based on the motion-patterns rather than the joint velocities or pose, (b)exploring the impact of training data and the different features on the classifiers&#x2019; accuracy, (c) not restricting the number of frames in a motion during recognition and formulate a method to deal with the variable number of frames in the motions.