Kathakali is one of the major form of Classical Indian Dance. The dance form is distinguished by the elaborately colourful make-up, costumes and face masks. In this work, we present (a) a framework to analyze the facial expressions of the actors and (b) novel visualization techniques for the same. Due to extensive makeup, costume and masks the general face analysis techniques fail on Kathakali videos. We present a dataset with manually annotated Kathakali sequences for four downstream tasks i.e. face detection, background subtraction, landmark detection and face segmentation. We rely on transfer learning and fine-tune deep learning models and present qualitative and quantitative results for these tasks. Finally, we present an novel application of style-transfer of Kathakali video onto a cartoonized face. The comprehensive framework presented in paper paves the way for better understanding, analysis, pedagogy and visualization of Kathakali videos.

All the outputs are uploaded in this shared folder: https://iiitaphyd-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/pratikkumar_bulani_alumni_iiit_ac_in/EgQyxDitTa1BihvrALxswd4B4gIYd0vbFtz0QUPbQ_orCQ?e=JPn8ea

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7i-RSp-AiPOQI_k0nRGb9fD6QwpNFu5x

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/wiced20221049

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