Fine-Grained Sports, Yoga, and Dance Postures Recognition: A Benchmark Analysis

Human body-pose estimation is a complex problem in computer vision. Recent research interests have been widened specifically on the sports, yoga, and dance (SYD) postures for maintaining health conditions. The SYD pose categories are regarded as a fine-grained image classification (FGIC) task due to the complex movement of body parts. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have attained significantly improved performance in solving various human body-pose estimation problems. Though decent progress has been achieved in yoga postures recognition using deep-learning techniques, fine-grained sports and dance recognition necessitates ample research attention. However, no benchmark public image dataset with sufficient interclass and intraclass variations is available yet to address sports and dance postures classification. To solve this limitation, we have proposed two image datasets, one for 102 sport categories and another for 12 dance styles. Two public datasets, Yoga-82 that contains 82 classes and Yoga-107 that represents 107 classes, are collected for yoga postures. These four SYD datasets are experimented with the proposed deep model, SYD-Net, which integrates a patch-based attention (PbA) mechanism on top of standard backbone CNNs. The PbA module leverages the self-attention mechanism that learns contextual information from a set of uniform and multiscale patches and emphasizes discriminative features to understand the semantic correlation among patches. Moreover, random erasing data augmentation is applied to improve performance. The proposed SYD-Net has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on Yoga-82 using five base CNNs. SYD-Net's accuracy on other datasets is remarkable, implying its efficiency. Our Sports-102 and Dance-12 datasets are publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/syd-net/home.

Automated summary

Human body-pose estimation is a complex problem in computer vision, and recent research has focused on sports, yoga, and dance postures for maintaining health conditions. Deep convolutional neural networks have shown significant improvement in solving human body-pose estimation problems. However, there is currently no benchmark public image dataset available for sports and dance postures classification. To address this, we have proposed two image datasets for sports and dance postures, and our deep model, SYD-Net, has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on the Yoga-82 dataset.