A CNN Based Approach to Classify the Folk Dances of Odisha

Folk dances are a primordial expression of ecstasy and bliss and serve as a mode of communication. They also facilitate in keeping the people connected to their traditions as well as ancestry. Furthermore, these dances help in preserving cultural unity and their tales can often reveal a lot about the periods these dances have developed through. Mahari, Gotipua and Odissi are such folk dance forms of the eastern state of Odisha. These folk dances are on the verge of extinction owing to the reducing number of practitioners, audience, absence of documentation, and digitalization. The absence of documentation has presented a barrier to the legitimacy of folk dance as an academic field of study. This research paper intends to focus on the classification of the folk dances of Odisha such as Mahari, Gotipua and Odissi which will help them to digitize and preserve. We propose deep learning-based methods for the classification and then it can be preserved. To validate the poses and hand motions, we offer a convolutional neural network model (CNN).