# Pose2Gest: A Few-Shot Model-Free Approach Applied In South Indian Classical Dance Gesture Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Mudragen: Geometrically Supervised Generation of Interacting Two-Hand Mudras for Preserving Indian Classical Dance Heritage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03415/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.