“Traditional African Dances Preservation Using Deep Learning Techniques” by Odefunso, Garcia Bravo and Chen

  • ©Adebunmi E. Odefunso, Esteban Garcia Bravo, and Victor Yingjie Chen

Conference:


Type:


Entry Number: 03

Title:

    Traditional African Dances Preservation Using Deep Learning Techniques

Presenter(s)/Author(s):



Abstract:


    Human action recognition continues to evolve and improve through deep learning techniques. There have been studies with some success in the field of action recognition, but only a few of them have focused on traditional dance. This is because dance actions, especially in traditional African dance, are long and involve fast movements. This research proposes a novel framework that applies data science algorithms to the field of cultural preservation by applying various deep learning techniques to identify, classify, and model traditional African dances from videos. Traditional dances are an important part of African culture and heritage. Digital preservation of these dances in their multitude and form is a challenging problem. The dance dataset was constituted from freely available YouTube videos. Four traditional African dances were used for the dance classification process: Adowa, Swange, Bata, and Sinte dance. Five Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models were used for the classification and achieved an accuracy between 93% and 98%. Additionally, human pose estimation algorithms were applied to Sinte dance. A model of Sinte dance that can be exported to other environments was obtained.

References:


    Tim C. Agber. 2013. “Yamuel Yashi Agbatar Gyur: The pioneer of Swange music,” Retrieved on 04/02/2021 from Tim Cuttings Agber — LiveJournal. https://timcuttings.livejournal.com/.Google Scholar
    Kingsley Ampomah. 2014. “An investigation into Adowa and Adzewa music and dance of the Akan people of Ghana,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 4, no. 10; August 2014. Available: http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_4_No_10_August_2014/15.pdf.Google Scholar
    Nikolaos Bakalos, Ioannis Rallis, Nikolaos Doulamis, Anastasios Doulamis, Eftychios Protopapadakis and Athanasios Voulodimos. 2019. “Choreographic pose identification using convolutional neural networks,” 2019 11th International Conference on Virtual Worlds and Games for Serious Applications (VS-Games), pp.1-7.Google Scholar
    Johannes H. Birringer. 2002. “Dance and media technologies,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol.24, no.1 pp.84-93, available: https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/25830.Google ScholarCross Ref
    M. K. Buckland. 2015. Cultural Heritage (Patrimony): An Introduction. UC Berkeley. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sh1r7t2.Google Scholar
    Zhe Cao, Gines Hidalgo, Tomas Simon, Shih-En Wei and Yaser Sheikh. 2019. “OpenPose: Realtime multi-person 2D pose estimation using part affinity fields,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol.43, no.1, pp.172-186. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08008.pdf.Google ScholarDigital Library
    Caroline Chan, Shiry Ginosar, Tinghui Zhou and Alexei A. Efros. 2019. “Everybody dance now”. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 5933–5942. arXiv.org. https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07371.Google Scholar
    Kyaien. O. Conner, Juanita Patterson-Price, and Niche Faulkner. 2021. “African Dance Is My Therapy”: Perspectives On the Unique Health Benefits of West African Dance. Journal of Dance Education, 21(2), 72–81. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1301010.Google ScholarCross Ref
    Akpenpuun Dzurgba. 2007. On the Tiv of Central Nigeria: A Cultural Perspective. Ibadan: John Achers, 2007.Google Scholar
    J. Goodridge. 1999. Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama Dance and Ceremony, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999.Google Scholar
    Doris Green. 1985. “African oral tradition literacy,” Journal of Black Studies,” vol. 15, no. 4, African and African American Dance, Music, and Theatre (June 1985), pp. 405–425.Google Scholar
    Doris Green. 2018. “The creation of traditional African dance/music integrated cores,” Journal of Movement Arts Literacy Archive (2013-2019): Vol. 4 : No. 1, Article 4. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=jmal.Google Scholar
    Sangeeta Jadhav, Manish Joshi and Jyoti Pawar. 2012.”Modeling BharataNatyam dance steps: Art to smart,” CUBE’ 12 : Proceedings of the CUBE international Information Technology Conference September 2012 pages 320-325. https://doi.org/10.1145/2381716.2381776.Google ScholarDigital Library
    Julie Beth Johnson. 2016. “Dancing down the floor: Experiences of ‘community’ in a West African dance class in Philadelphia,” PhD Dissertation, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/1526.Google Scholar
    Ioannis Kapsouras, Stylianos Karanikolos, Nikolaos Nikolaidis and Anastasios Tefas. 2013. “Feature comparison and feature fusion for traditional dances recognition.” In: Iliadis, L., Papadopoulos, H., Jayne, C. (eds) Engineering Applications of Neural Networks. EANN 2013. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 383. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41013-0_18.Google Scholar
    Vinay Kaushik, Prerana Mukherjee and Brejesh Lall. 2018. Nrityantar, “Pose oblivious Indian classical dance sequence classification system,” Available: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.05231.pdf. Krishna V. V. Kumar, P. V. V. Kishore, D. Anil Kumar, and E. Kiran Kumar. 2018. “Indian classical dance action identification using Adaboost multiclass classifier on multifeature fusion,” 2018 Conference on Signal Processing and Communication Engineering Systems (SPACES), Vijayawada, 2018, pp. 167–170. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8316338.Google Scholar
    Georgios Lykesas. 2018. “The transformation of traditional dance from its first to its second existence: The effectiveness of music — movement education and creative dance in the preservation of our cultural heritage,” Journal of Education and Training Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, January 2018. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1166100.pdf.Google Scholar
    Anupama Mallik, Santanu Chaudhury and Hiranmay Ghosh. 2011. “Nrityakosha: Preserving the intangible heritage of Indian classical dance,” Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage,” December 2011, vol.4, issue 3, no.11, pp.1-25, available: https://doi.org/10.1145/2069276.2069280.Google ScholarDigital Library
    Ryan Moffatt. 2013. Classical Chinese Dance: A Great Cultural Treasure,” 2013, Available: https://www.theepochtimes.com/classical-chinese-dance-a-great-cultural-treasure_376422.html.Google Scholar
    Nicole M. Monteiro and Diana J. Wall. 2011. African dance as healing modality throughout the diaspora: The use of ritual and movement to work through trauma. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 4(6), 234–252. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251237748_African_Dance_as_Healing_Modality_Throughout_the_Diaspora_The_Use_of_Ritual_and_Movement_to_Work_Through_Trauma.Google Scholar
    Jacob Oluwafemi. 2018. “Communicative and expressive value of Bata dance in contemporary Nigeria,” Society of Nigeria Theatre Artists (SONTA). Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328583712_COMMUNICATIVE_AND_EXPRESSIVE_VALUE_OF_BATA_DANCE_IN_CONTEMPORARY_NIGERIA.Google Scholar
    Ojuade J. Olasukanmi. 1998. “The secularization of Bata dance in Nigeria,” Available: https://studylib.net/doc/16113667/the-secularization-of-bata-dance-in-nigeria–ojuade-jelee.Google Scholar
    M. M. Sani. 2012. “An adaptation of performance using Swange music to create conceptual painting through dance steps: An exploration,” Fine Art Department, A.B.U., Zaria, 2012, Accessed on 20/2/2015 from www.nsukkajornalofthehumanities.com/download.php?download.Google Scholar
    Alexander Toshev and Christian Szegedy. 2014. “DeepPose: Human pose estimation via deep neural network,”. 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2014, Columbus, OH, pp. 1653-1660, doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2014.214. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4659.pdf.Google ScholarDigital Library
    R.A. Tsevende, T.C. Agber, D.S. Iorngurum, and N. N. Ugbagir. 2013. Tiv Swange Music and Dance. Abuja, Nigeria: Midan Press, 2013.Google Scholar
    Tran H. Tuan and Stale Navrud. 2008. Capturing the benefits of preserving cultural heritage. Journal of Cultural Heritage, vol. 9, pp 326-337, 2008. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207408000459.Google ScholarCross Ref
    Kariamu Welsh-Asante. 1998. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, INC.,1998.Google Scholar
    Godwin Yina. 2011. Semiotics of Tiv Oral Poetry. Makurdi: Aboki Publishers, 2011. http://opac.bsum.edu.ng:8000/cgi-bin/koha/opac-export.pl?op=export&bib=1391&format=ris.Google Scholar


ACM Digital Library Publication:



Overview Page: