The classical dances from India utilize a set of hand gestures known as Mudras, serving as the foundational elements of its posture vocabulary. Identifying these mudras represents a primary task in digitizing the dance performances. With Kathakali, a dance-drama, as the focus, this work addresses mudra recognition by framing it as a 24-class classification problem and proposes a novel vector-similarity-based approach leveraging pose estimation techniques. This method obviates the need for extensive training or fine-tuning, thus mitigating the issue of limited data availability common in similar AI applications. Achieving an accuracy rate of 92%, our approach demonstrates comparable or superior performance to existing model-training-based methodologies in this domain. Notably, it remains effective even with small datasets comprising just 1 or 5 samples, albeit with a slightly diminished performance. Furthermore, our system supports processing images, videos, and real-time streams, accommodating both hand-cropped and full-body images. As part of this research, we have curated and released a publicly accessible Hasta Mudra dataset, which applies to multiple South Indian art forms including Kathakali. The implementation of the proposed method is also made available as a web application.

Functional linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) is a powerful tool that extends LDA-mediated multiclass classification and dimension reduction to univariate time-series functions. However, in the age of large multivariate and incomplete data, statistical dependencies between features must be estimated in a computationally tractable way, while also dealing with missing data. There is a need for a computationally tractable approach that considers the statistical dependencies between features and can handle missing values. We here develop a multivariate version of FLDA (MUDRA) to tackle this issue and describe an efficient expectation/conditional-maximization (ECM) algorithm to infer its parameters. We assess its predictive power on the "Articulary Word Recognition" data set and show its improvement over the state-of-the-art, especially in the case of missing data. MUDRA allows interpretable classification of data sets with large proportions of missing data, which will be particularly useful for medical or psychological data sets.

Most of the human activities in daily life are communicating with others. Navigation, manipulation and gesture are some of the basic interactions. Perhaps people are supported by ground to navigate complex situations and avoid obstacles [1]. They always use their hands and fingers in a large number of tasks to communicate with others (through communication gestures) or with the physical world around them. This recommends that movement and communication with the environment are strongly intertwined [2].