Posture and sequence recognition for Bharatanatyam dance performances using machine learning approach

Understanding the underlying semantics of performing arts like dance is a challenging task. Dance is multimedia in nature and spans over time as well as space. Capturing and analyzing the multimedia content of the dance is useful for the preservation of cultural heritage, to build video recommendation systems, to assist learners to use tutoring systems. To develop an application for dance, three aspects of dance analysis need to be addressed: 1) Segmentation of the dance video to find the representative action elements, 2) Matching or recognition of the detected action elements, and 3) Recognition of the dance sequences formed by combining a number of action elements under certain rules. This paper attempts to solve three fundamental problems of dance analysis for understanding the underlying semantics of dance forms. Our focus is on an Indian Classical Dance (ICD) form known as Bharatanatyam. As dance is driven by music, we use the music as well as motion information for key posture extraction. Next, we recognize the key postures using machine learning as well as deep learning techniques. Finally, the dance sequence is recognized using the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We capture the multi-modal data of Bharatanatyam dance using Kinect and build an annotated data set for research in ICD.