A Bag of Words approach for recognition of Greek folk
dances
Eftychia Fotiadou
eftifot@aiia.csd.auth.gr
Nikos Nikolaidis
nikolaid@aiia.csd.auth.gr
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
ABSTRACT
In this paper we explore the problem of distinguishing Greek
folk dances from other kinds of activities, as well as from
other dance genres, using video recordings. For this purpose,
we adopt dense trajectories descriptors along with a Bag of
Words (BoW) model to represent the motion depicted in
the videos. Subsequently, a Support Vector Machine (SVM)
classifier is used for classification. In order to evaluate the
performance and the adequacy of the aforementioned frame-
work for the dance recognition task, we performed experi-
ments for three different classification setups: 1) Greek folk
dances vs other activities (including different dance genres),
2) six different dance genres and 3) Greek vs Balkan folk
dances. The aforementioned experiments exhibited satisfac-
tory results, with successful recognition rates higher than
89.74%.
CCS Concepts
•Computing methodologies → Activity recognition
and understanding;
Keywords
dance recognition, classification, Bag of Words model
1. INTRODUCTION
Activity recognition refers to the process through which
human motions depicted in videos or other types of media
(e.g. motion capture data) are automatically classified to
a number of predefined classes. Surveillance systems, se-
mantic annotation of content in multimedia databases, and
human-computer interaction are, among others, some ex-
amples of the diverse applications that benefit from the de-
velopment of efficient activity recognition algorithms. As
a consequence, activity recognition has become a very ac-
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2903220.2903221
Ioannis Kapsouras
jkapsouras@aiia.csd.auth.gr
Anastasios Tefas
tefas@aiia.csd.auth.gr
tive research field of computer vision and various approaches
have been proposed during the last years [11],[6].
In this paper, we deal with a more complex activity class,
namely dance. Dance can be thought of as a composition of
elementary motions (i.e. dance steps), the combination of
which, in a certain temporal order, gives rise to the chore-
ography. Therefore, the activity of dancing, unlike other
types of everyday activities commonly treated in activity
recognition research (e.g. running, jumping or waving), is
characterized by high complexity and variation, rendering
the recognition problem more challenging.
While there exists a large body of research related to
recognition of simple, everyday activities, there is a rela-
tively limited number of publications regarding dance recog-
nition. In [8], a method for distinction among different In-
dian classical dances is proposed. A pose descriptor, based
on the histogram of oriented optical flow, is introduced to
represent each frame of a video sequence in a hierarchical
manner. An alternative SVD-based scheme, called Segmen-
tal SVD (SegSVD), suitable for recognition of dance motions
acquired through motion capture, is proposed in [3]. The ad-
vantage of this method is, that it takes into consideration
the temporal order of the samples in the motion capture
sequence. In [7], a real-time framework for classification of
dance gestures from skeleton animation data is proposed.
It includes an angular representation of the skeleton and
a classifier based on cascaded correlation. Furthermore, a
distance metric based on dynamic time warping is adopted,
which estimates the difference between an input gesture and
an oracle.
A method for classifying ballet moves from motion data
acquired with the Microsoft Kinect sensor is presented in
[2]. Another method for classification of ballet moves is in-
troduced in [1], where a deformable model is proposed to
represent the trajectories of the joints of a moving body,
provided by a motion capture system. Finally, a method
for recognition of different dance gestures of Bali traditional
dance, can be found in [4]. The authors adopt a skeletal rep-
resentation similar to [7], in order to represent data captured
with a static mounted depth sensor. Subsequently, classifi-
cation is performed using a linguistic motivated method.
In this paper, we explore various classification scenar-
ios, which involve dances from the Greek folk dances genre,
recorded into video. Folk dances consist an important part
of a country’s cultural heritage, conveying information as-
sociated with old customs, aspects of everyday life, as well
 Figure 1: Flowchart for the recognition framework.
as historic events. For the above reason, the systematic or-
ganization, processing and analysis of multimedia material
related to folk dances is of great significance for educational
and cultural purposes. The classification scenarios consid-
ered in this paper include distinguishing Greek folk dance
videos from videos depicting other kinds of activities (in-
cluding other dance genres), discrimination among different
dance genres, as well as discrimination between Greek and
Balkan folk dances. The latter have been selected as a spe-
cial and challenging case, since they usually exhibit signif-
icant resemblance to Greek folk dances, which makes dis-
tinction more difficult. In contrast to most of the aforemen-
tioned approaches, where recognition is mostly performed at
the level of individual dance, dance gesture or dance move,
we consider a more generic problem. Furthermore, as far as
the definition of dance is concerned, we choose to work with
dance video sequences consisting of an arbitrary number of
consecutive dance moves, i.e. real world dance videos col-
lected from Youtube, rather than isolated moves, which is a
more realistic scenario.
In order to distinguish Greek folk dances from other activ-
ities or dance genres, we combined the method described in
[9], which extracts feature descriptors from video data based
on dense trajectories, with a Bag of Words approach, com-
monly used in pattern recognition tasks. Classification of
the histograms is then performed using an (SVM) classifier
with a χ2 kernel.
2. METHOD DESCRIPTION
The utilized method for folk dances recognition comprises
of a feature extraction stage, where dense trajectories are
calculated from the videos and a classification stage, which
involves the construction of a Bag of Words model from the
data. The aforementioned steps are shown in the flowchart
of Fig. 1. In the following sub-sections, the details of the
utilized method are provided.
2.1 Dense Trajectories
Dense trajectories ([9],[10]) provide an efficient represen-
tation of motion depicted in video sequences, which is suit-
able for activity recognition tasks. Dense trajectories are
calculated by first densely sampling points of the video at
different spatial scales. The sampled points located in areas
of the video containing motion are tracked on each spatial
scale separately, using the information from the dense opti-
cal flow field. A trajectory is formed by points in successive
frames: (Pt , Pt+1 , Pt+2 , ..., Pt+L ), where L is the length of
the trajectory. Consequently, each trajectory is represented
by a descriptor defined by the following formula:
(∆Pt , ∆Pt+1 , ..., ∆Pt+L−1 )
T= Pt+L−1 , (1)
j=t k∆Pj k
where ∆Pt = (Pt+1 − Pt ) = (xt+1 − xt , yt+1 − yt ) is the
displacement vector between two successive frames.
Apart from the trajectories themselves, additional descrip-
tors are calculated in the spatio-temporal volumes surround-
ing each trajectory. In more detail, an N × N × L sized vol-
ume around a trajectory is subdivided in a grid of cells and
for each of them a bundle of histograms is computed: His-
togram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), which captures static
local appearance information, Histogram of Optical Flow
(HOF), which carries information related to local motion,
and Motion Boundary Histograms in horizontal (x) and ver-
tical (y) directions (MBHx and MBHy respectively), which
capture the relative motion between pixels, eliminating in
this way the unwanted camera motion.
 (a) (b) (c) (d)

(e) (f) (g)

Figure 2: Sample frames from videos of the activity classes included in our dataset: (a) Greek folk dance,
(b) Balkan folk dance, (c) ballet, (d) ballroom, (e) hip hop, (f ) tap, (g) kiss from Hollywood2 dataset.

2.2 Bag of Words Model and classification In order to calculate the kernel function, we fuse the five
The process described in the previous subsection results in different histograms derived from the descriptor types dis-
the extraction of five different types of descriptors (feature cussed in 2.1 in two ways. According to the first, we perform
vectors) for each trajectory. A Bag of Words (BoW) model is kernel addition, i.e. we compute separate kernels, one for
built for each type of features, using the procedure described each descriptor type, and subsequently add them. Alterna-
below. tively, we apply histogram concatenation, i.e. we concate-
Let us represent a video sequence with X = {v1 , v2 , ..., nate the five different histograms calculated for each video
vF }, where vi denotes each of the F feature vectors. Ini- in a vector and calculate a single kernel.
tially, a codebook is created by applying the k-means algo-
rithm in order to cluster the feature vectors from a train- 3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
ing videos set into C clusters. Each codeword represents
the centroid of a cluster. Subsequently, for each training The objective of our experiments was to test whether the
video, a histogram can be calculated as follows: a video X method described in the previous section is suitable for dis-
is transformed to a sequence XD = {d1 , d2 , ..., dF }, where tinguishing Greek folk dances from other activities or dance
each feature vector di is derived by replacing the feature genres. For this reason, we built a dataset consisting of di-
vector vi with the codeword (cluster center) which is clos- verse types of activities. In more detail, we included videos
est to it. By calculating the frequency of occurrence for of:
each of the C codewords in the sequence XD , a histogram
• Greek folk dances: 39 videos from 13 different dances
s = {s1 , s2 , ..., sC } of the codeword appearances can be con-
(3 videos per dance), with an approximate duration of
structed.
1-2 min per video. The folk dances we selected were
The same procedure is followed in order to calculate the
Aloniotikos, Kori Eleni, Mpaintouskino, Mpoufiko, Poust-
histogram of a test sequence. For each feature vector of a
seno, Ramna, Sarakina, Stankena, Syrtos, Tikfeskino,
test sequence, the distances to all codewords are estimated,
Tsourapia, Zavlitsena and Zaramo.
and the feature vector is replaced by the codeword which
is closest to it. The test histogram is constructed by calcu-
• Balkan folk dances: 39 videos from folk dances from
lating the frequencies of occurrence of each codeword in the
countries of the Balkans region, except for Greece, ∼
sequence.
1-2 min long.
After the histograms for all the training videos have been
calculated, they are used along with their labels to train an
• other dance genres: 39 videos from ballet, ballroom,
SVM classifier. In order to classify test sequences, the corre-
hip hop and tap dance, ∼ 0.5-6 min long.
sponding histograms are extracted and subsequently fed to
the SVM classifier. The SVM is used along with a χ2 kernel,
• Hollywood2 dataset [5]: 40 videos from all 12 avail-
calculated by the following formula:
able motion classes, namely AnswerPhone, DriveCar,
1 Eat, FightPerson, GetOutCar, HandShake, HugPer-
K(si , sj ) = exp(− D(si , sj )) (2)
A son, Kiss, Run, SitDown, SitUp, StandUp, were in-
cluded. The duration of the videos varies between 2.5
where D(si , sj ) denotes the χ2 distance between histograms sec and 2 min.
si = {si1 , si2 , ..., siC } and sj = {sj1 , sj2 , ..., sjC }:
C Sample frames from the dataset used in our experiments
1 X (sik − sjk )2 are shown in Fig. 2. Most videos, except for those from
D(si , sj ) = , (3)
2 sik + sjk the Hollywood2 dataset, were collected from Youtube. The
k=1
dances depicted in the respective videos are performed mainly
while A is a scaling factor, calculated as the mean of χ2 by professional dancers. Also, they exhibit high variabil-
distances between all training samples. ity with respect to the recording conditions (i.e. lighting
 Table 1: Correct recognition rates
Recognition problem Histogram Concatenation
Greek dances vs all other activities
Dance genres
Greek vs Balkan folk dances
conditions, professional or non-professional camera opera-
tor, static or moving camera), a fact that renders the recog-
nition task more realistic but more challenging at the same
time.
For the extraction of dense trajectories features from the
video data, we used the default parameter values used in [9].
Furthermore, codebooks for each feature type, consisting of
4000 codewords were calculated using the training data.
The first test we conducted involved a two-class classifi-
cation scenario, where Greek folk dances are distinguished
from all other activity types of our dataset. Therefore, the
first class consists of the Greek folk dance video sequences
(26 training and 13 testing), while the second class contains
videos from Balkan folk dances, other dance genres, as well
as from the Hollywood2 dataset (71 training and 38 testing
videos in total). As it can be observed from Table 1, for this
experimental setting, the method achieved high recognition
rates, for both types of descriptors fusion.
Furthermore, we tested the method in a six-class clas-
sification experiment for dance genre recognition. For the
purposes of this experiment we used video sequences from
the following activity types: Greek folk dances, Balkan folk
dances, ballet, ballroom, hip hop and tap. The training set
for this experiment consisted of 68 videos, while the testing
set of 39 videos. In this case, the recognition rates were sig-
nificantly lower than the ones of the previous test, which is
expected, as the recognition task involves six classes instead
of two. It is observed that fusing the descriptors by adding
the individual kernels, achieves a better performance than
concatenating them and using a single kernel.
Finally, we performed experiments in order to test whether
the method is capable of distinguishing Greek from Balkan
folk dances, a challenging setup due to the similarities of the
two genres. In this case, we consider the two-class classifica-
tion problem, where each class consists of the videos corre-
sponding to Greek and Balkan dances respectively (52 train-
ing and 26 testing videos in total). The correct recognition
rate for the above problem was 92.31% for separately cal-
culated kernels and 88.46% for single kernel. As in the case
of dance genres classification, the kernel addition yielded
higher rates.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper we adopted an existing framework for recog-
nition of generic activities (i.e. the Bag of Words model in
combination with dense trajectories descriptors), in order
to distinguish Greek folk dances from other kind of activ-
ities, as well as from other dance genres. The aforemen-
tioned framework exhibited very good results in the case
of two-class classification problems. Specifically, a rate as
high as 96.08% was observed in the recognition task for
Greek dances vs all other activities and 92.31% in that of
distinguishing Greek from Balkan folk dances. The perfor-
Kernel Addition
Rate Rate
96.08% 96.08%
79.49% 89.74%
88.46% 92.31%
mance of the method was also satisfactory in the case of a six
class classification scenario involving different dance genres,
where 89.74% successful recognition rate was achieved. As
a matter of fact, the method exhibits promising results for
recognition among different individual Greek folk dances, a
scenario that we intend to pursue in our future research.
5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research has been co-financed by the European Union
(European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds
through the Operation Program ”Education and Lifelong
Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework
(NSRF) - Research Funding Program: THALIS-UOA-ERA-
SITECHNIS MIS 375435.
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