Classification of Bharatanatyam postures using tailored features and artificial neural network

Bharatanatyam is a classical dance form of India that upholds the rich culture of India. This dance is learned under the supervision of Guru, the teacher traditionally called in India. The scarcity of experts resulted in the decline of people practicing this dance. There is a need for leveraging technology in preserving and promoting this traditional dance and propagating it amongst the youth. In this research, it is attempted to develop a methodology for automated classification of Bharatanatyam dance postures. The methodology involves extraction of existing features such as speeded up robust features (SURF) and histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), which are used to train and test an artificial neural network (ANN). The results are corroborated with deep learning architectures such as AlexNet and GoogleNet. The proposed methodology has yielded a classification accuracy of 99.85% as compared with 93.10% and 94.25% of AlexNet and GoogleNet respectively. The proposed method finds applications such as assistance to Bharatanatyam dance teachers, e-learning of dance, and evaluating the correctness of the postures.