Automatic Bharatnatyam Dance Posture Recognition and Expertise Prediction Using Depth Cameras

Abstract

Bharatnatyam is an ancient Indian Classical Dance form consisting of complex postures and movements. One main challenge which has not been addressed till now in the intelligent systems community is to perform pose recognition for the basic postures of this dance form called the Bhangas and use this for expertise prediction. In this paper, pose recognition is performed for some important postures in Bharatnatyam in order to find the origin of these postures from the Bhangas and further use this result to predict the expertise of a Bharatnatyam dancer. The features extracted are 10 joint angles using 15 joint locations to predict the 22 postures derived from the basic postures (Bhangas). Support Vector Machine classifier with a radial basis function kernel performed the best for pose recognition. By performing stick figure analysis and grouping of labels we estimate the origin of each of these postures from the Bhangas. This is followed by verification of the grouping using Hamming distance calculation. Testing is done on our own Bharatnatyam dataset consisting of 102 dancers, achieving an accuracy of 87.14%. Expertise prediction of the dancers for the 22 poses was performed for four ratings - Excellent, Good, Satisfactory and Poor giving an accuracy of 68.46% without grouping of postures and 80.80% with grouping of postures.