Yoga Pose Estimation and Feedback Generation Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Yoga is a 5000-year-old practice developed in ancient India by the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. The word yoga means deep association and union of mind with the body. It is used to keep both mind and body in equilibration in all flip-flops of life by means of asana, meditation, and several other techniques. Nowadays, yoga has gained worldwide attention due to increased stress levels in the modern lifestyle, and there are numerous methods or resources for learning yoga. Yoga can be practiced in yoga centers, through personal tutors, and can also be learned on one’s own with the help of the Internet, books, recorded clips, etc. In fast-paced lifestyles, many people prefer self-learning because the abovementioned resources might not be available all the time. But in self-learning, one may not find an incorrect pose. Incorrect posture can be harmful to one’s health, resulting in acute pain and long-term chronic concerns. In this paper, deep learning-based techniques are developed to detect incorrect yoga posture. With this method, the users can select the desired pose for practice and can upload recorded videos of their yoga practice pose. The user pose is sent to train models that output the abnormal angles detected between the actual pose and the user pose. With these outputs, the system advises the user to improve the pose by specifying where the yoga pose is going wrong. The proposed method was compared to several state-of-the-art methods, and it achieved outstanding accuracy of 0.9958 while requiring less computational complexity.