# Data Mining and Video Target Detection-Based Analysis of Martial Arts Cultural Communication and Martial Arts Athletes’ Posture

Authors: Zhen Ma; Yanping Ma
Journal: Mobile Information Systems
 (2022)

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## Abstract

With the continuous deepening of economic globalization and the continuous development of Internet big data, the spread of martial arts culture has attracted people’s attention. The advent of the Internet big data era has brought new opportunities and media for the dissemination of martial arts culture but also brought certain risks and challenges. This paper firstly uses the literature method, logical analysis method, and related theories of communication, with the help of the SWOT strategic analysis method, to analyze the internal advantages and disadvantages faced by martial arts culture communication itself, as well as the external opportunities in the context of the Internet big data era and challenges. In order to realize the target detection and tracking task of Martial athletes, this paper proposes a target detection and tracking algorithm for Martial athletes. First, the algorithm constructs and trains a fully CNN-based athlete target detection model, which can detect the first frame of athlete targets in martial arts competitions or martial arts training videos. Experiments show that the athlete positioning information output by the detection model and the video frame sequence are jointly input into the athlete target tracking module based on neighborhood similarity, so as to realize the target tracking of martial arts athletes.


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## Body

## 1. Introduction

As a unique sport of the Chinese nation, martial arts is loved by the Chinese people and the world because of its practicality, fitness, viewing, and cultural characteristics [1]. Wushu is an inherited technology of ancient military war. Practicing martial arts can not only strengthen the body but also defend the enemy’s attack. Martial arts practitioners take “stopping invasion” as the technical guidance and lead practitioners into the traditional way of Enlightenment (martial arts) to understand the objective laws of man, nature, and society. It is the guidance and guarantee of human material civilization and a display of contemporary traditional martial arts. At the same time, martial arts culture has been integrated into the strong sense of responsibility and mission of the Chinese nation in the long history of development [2]. The spread of martial arts culture is limited and there is a lack of corresponding talents [3]. The transmission method of Martial mainly relies on the inheritance of masters and the education of Martial in schools [4]. Although the two transmission methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, they cannot complement each other [5]. At the same time, although there are many martial arts talents in our country, there are very few talents who have a comprehensive understanding of martial arts knowledge and can make full use of Internet big data to spread martial arts culture [6]. These disadvantages will increase the risk of faults in the spread of martial arts culture to a certain extent. With the change of modern people’s way of life and production, philosophical concepts are constantly missing in the teaching and dissemination of martial arts [7].Internet big data has predictive accuracy and intelligent services that can be accurately pushed according to people’s needs [8]. Social media has become an integral part of modern life, and its low threshold allows people from all walks of life to participate. In this process, the public is both a recipient of the information and a mass communicator. The external challenge to the spread of martial arts culture is the influence of foreign cultures on Chinese martial arts culture. Western sports culture accompanies economic and political activities and uses the Olympic Games as a medium to continuously export Western sports and humanistic concepts to China, which has led to the loss of traditional Chinese martial arts culture [9]. Foreign cultures have some reference value for us, but there is a threat of replacement of the culture of our martial arts in the exchange with foreign cultures, and we need to face the challenge [10, 11].Martial arts culture is faced with impetuousness and utilitarianism in the process of dissemination, and it cannot be carried forward and inherited [12]. Chinese martial arts culture should use Internet big data to achieve mass communication and point-to-point communication, and officials should also actively lead the values of martial arts culture and enrich the connotation of martial arts philosophy [13]. Cultural and sports departments and martial arts associations should play a leading role, strengthen supervision and management, and sort out the content of dissemination. By entering new media, it will lead the cultural communication again and reshape the image of martial arts culture. At the same time, the main body of foreign communication should also play an important role. On the basis of fully understanding the education level and cultural background of foreign people, the Internet big data can be used to achieve point-to-point communication [14]. In the context of big data, martial arts culture needs to use the offline and online linkage effect to change its asymmetric status in international communication.The lack of analysis talents in the martial arts culture industry limits the spread of martial arts culture, while strengthening the training of martial arts talents’ ability to analyze big data, it is also necessary to strengthen the training of martial arts knowledge structure and ability, and finally achieve the purpose of precise service [15, 16].According to the subjective visual analysis, the moving target area detected and located by the algorithm in this paper has a very high degree of coincidence with the area where the athlete can be distinguished by the human eye, and the number of background image pixels of the nonathlete target within the circumscribed rectangle is relatively small [17]. Therefore, through subjective visual analysis, it can be seen that the accuracy of target detection and tracking of the algorithm in this paper is high [18]. In the experiment part, some mainstream athlete target detection and tracking algorithms are objectively evaluated through the two objective evaluation indicators of average overlap rate and average pixel error [19]. Through data analysis, it can be seen that the average overlap rate and average pixel error of the proposed algorithm are better than other athlete target detection and tracking algorithms [20]. Therefore, the accuracy of target detection and tracking of martial arts athletes based on the algorithm in this paper is better than that of similar algorithms [21].This paper proposes a video target detection and tracking algorithm for detecting and tracking targets of martial arts athletes [22]. The algorithm consists of an athlete detection model based on a fully CNN and an athlete target tracking algorithm based on neighborhood similarity [23]. This paper builds and trains a fully CNN to detect where martial arts athletes appear in static images [24]. In order to track the target of martial arts athletes, this paper calculates the Euclidean distance of the gray value of the neighborhood pixels centered on different pixels, this value is used to measure the similarity between each pixel in the target area of the current frame and each pixel in the possible target area of the next frame, so as to realize the target tracking task of martial arts athletes [25].


## 2. Pose Estimation Open Pose

Open Pose, an open source library based on deep learning proposed by Carnegie University in the USA, can realize the recognition and capture of human movements, finger movements, facial expressions, etc., perform a more accurate estimation of the human pose in the image, and extract multiple key points of the body, hand, or facial bones. It is suitable for single and multiplayer situations with excellent robustness.This paper uses the feature of this algorithm to extract the key frames or pictures in the exerciser and the standard motion video and use it as the material for subsequent comparison, the key points of the human body are identified as shown in Figure1.Figure 1
The key points of the human body.


## 3. Hybrid CNN-HMM

The hybrid CNN-HMM scheme in this paper is shown in Figure2, this method embeds the output probability matrix of CNN into the observation probability matrix of HMM for modeling.Figure 2
Hybrid CNN-HMM structure diagram.The input data stream is denoted asX=X1,X2,…,XT, the maximum posterior probability PS|X of the CNN output is selected, and the best fitting sequence S˜ of the model is obtained according to the Bayesian decision rule.(1)S˜=argmaxSPS|X=argmaxSPX|SPSPX.Here,PS|X is expressed as the product of the class prior probability PS, we can get the following equation:(2)S˜=arg maxSPX|SPS.According to the time change of the input, using HMM modeling, using the first-order Markov assumption to maximizePX|S, we can get the following equation:(3)PX|S≈maxS1⋯ST∏t=1TPst|st−1Pxt|st.ConvertingPxt|st to likelihood according to Bayes’ rule, we get the following equation:(4)Pxt|st=Pst|xtPxtPst.Deleting the constantPxt, the final action prediction sequence of the hybrid CNN-HMM method can be obtained according to equations (1) to (4):(5)S˜=argmaxSmaxs1⋯sT∏t=1TPst|st−1Pst|xtPstPS.


## 4. System Overview

The hybrid CNN-HMM human action recognition method is divided into two parts: training phase and testing phase; the purpose is to build a model on the training data set and evaluate the performance on the test data set, so as to obtain a human action recognition algorithm model with generalization ability.The general idea of the Open Pose algorithm is as follows: the input image is processed by a 10-layer VCG19 network, the image featureF is extracted, and then the feature F is put into two convolutional networks for calculation; that is, the key point confidence network S and the key point pro and the degree vector field network L and then predict the confidence and affinity vectors of each key point. Then, the key points are clustered through binary matching, the skeleton nodes of the same person are spliced, and finally the skeleton information of each person is obtained. Traditional pose estimation algorithms need to rely on depth camera calculations, while Open Pose can achieve excellent real-time performance using only a monocular camera.


### 4.1. Training Phase

In order to learn how to predict the output from the input, in the training phase, the best parameters are found using the labeled training dataset to build the best training model and predict the output, the process is shown in Figure3 in the following steps.Figure 3
Hybrid CNN-HMM training.In the preprocessing process, the training dataset is first cleaned up, then scaled in a certain proportion in a certain area, and the training dataset is divided into continuous data segments according to the experimental actions.CNN is selected as the baseline classification algorithm, and the segmented data segments are introduced into the CNN-HMM hybrid algorithm for training.To ensure the smoothness of the time series, the CNN classification results are combined with the hidden Markov model, and the initial and transfer probabilities of the hidden Markov model are generated in this step [26, 27].


### 4.2. Test Phase

In order to evaluate the performance of the model and test the final generalization ability, in the testing phase of the system, the never-used test data set is applied to the prediction model established in the training phase to complete the prediction of the action sequence, the process is shown in Figure4, and the specific steps are as follows.Figure 4
Hybrid CNN-HMM testing phase.The experimental data is divided into data segments, called data windows, and these data are marked as test data.the CNN model is used to classify the preprocessed data, and a posterior probability distribution is output whose sum is 1, that is, the probability corresponding to each action pattern.In order to make full use of the time information in the experiment, the posterior probability distribution result output by CNN is embedded in the observation probability matrix of HMM, and the Viterbi algorithm is used to reclassify it to obtain the best action sequence.The algorithm performance is tested according to different evaluation indicators.The front end of the fully CNN constructed in this paper contains 6 convolutional layers and 5 pooling layers. The backend of the fully CNN consists of 6 deconvolutional layers and 5 upsampling layers. If an image containing 224 × 224 pixels is fed into a fully CNN, the size of the image is changed to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 of the original input image size through five pooling layers, respectively. The size of the convolution kernel of the last convolutional layer is 7 × 7 × 32, so the front end of the fully CNN outputs a 1 × 1 × 32 feature map. The backend of the fully CNN performs 6 deconvolutions and 5 upsampling on the feature maps output by the frontend. Finally, a feature map with the same size as the original image is obtained, and then the detection task of the target of martial arts athletes is completed.After completing the target detection of martial arts athletes, it is also necessary to track other frames in the video, so as to record the trajectory of the athlete’s target. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes an athlete target tracking algorithm based on neighborhood similarity. Firstly, on the premise that the position of the athlete is detected in the first frame image, the circumscribed rectangle marking the position of the athlete is enlarged by 20% in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, so as to cover the possible position of the athlete in the next frame of the image. Secondly, the neighborhood similarity between the detected athlete target pixel in the current frame and all the pixels in the possible appearance area of the athlete target in the next frame image is calculated. The pixel with the highest similarity is selected as the position where the target pixel of the current frame appears in the next frame. Finally, repeat the above-given two steps to complete the athlete target tracking task in the martial arts competition video.


## 4.1. Training Phase

In order to learn how to predict the output from the input, in the training phase, the best parameters are found using the labeled training dataset to build the best training model and predict the output, the process is shown in Figure3 in the following steps.Figure 3
Hybrid CNN-HMM training.In the preprocessing process, the training dataset is first cleaned up, then scaled in a certain proportion in a certain area, and the training dataset is divided into continuous data segments according to the experimental actions.CNN is selected as the baseline classification algorithm, and the segmented data segments are introduced into the CNN-HMM hybrid algorithm for training.To ensure the smoothness of the time series, the CNN classification results are combined with the hidden Markov model, and the initial and transfer probabilities of the hidden Markov model are generated in this step [26, 27].


## 4.2. Test Phase

In order to evaluate the performance of the model and test the final generalization ability, in the testing phase of the system, the never-used test data set is applied to the prediction model established in the training phase to complete the prediction of the action sequence, the process is shown in Figure4, and the specific steps are as follows.Figure 4
Hybrid CNN-HMM testing phase.The experimental data is divided into data segments, called data windows, and these data are marked as test data.the CNN model is used to classify the preprocessed data, and a posterior probability distribution is output whose sum is 1, that is, the probability corresponding to each action pattern.In order to make full use of the time information in the experiment, the posterior probability distribution result output by CNN is embedded in the observation probability matrix of HMM, and the Viterbi algorithm is used to reclassify it to obtain the best action sequence.The algorithm performance is tested according to different evaluation indicators.The front end of the fully CNN constructed in this paper contains 6 convolutional layers and 5 pooling layers. The backend of the fully CNN consists of 6 deconvolutional layers and 5 upsampling layers. If an image containing 224 × 224 pixels is fed into a fully CNN, the size of the image is changed to 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 of the original input image size through five pooling layers, respectively. The size of the convolution kernel of the last convolutional layer is 7 × 7 × 32, so the front end of the fully CNN outputs a 1 × 1 × 32 feature map. The backend of the fully CNN performs 6 deconvolutions and 5 upsampling on the feature maps output by the frontend. Finally, a feature map with the same size as the original image is obtained, and then the detection task of the target of martial arts athletes is completed.After completing the target detection of martial arts athletes, it is also necessary to track other frames in the video, so as to record the trajectory of the athlete’s target. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes an athlete target tracking algorithm based on neighborhood similarity. Firstly, on the premise that the position of the athlete is detected in the first frame image, the circumscribed rectangle marking the position of the athlete is enlarged by 20% in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, so as to cover the possible position of the athlete in the next frame of the image. Secondly, the neighborhood similarity between the detected athlete target pixel in the current frame and all the pixels in the possible appearance area of the athlete target in the next frame image is calculated. The pixel with the highest similarity is selected as the position where the target pixel of the current frame appears in the next frame. Finally, repeat the above-given two steps to complete the athlete target tracking task in the martial arts competition video.


## 5. Test Effect

In the experimental part, the algorithm of target detection and tracking of Wushu athletes proposed in this paper is simulated and verified by a computer. The central processing unit of the computer is i7-11700 K, the memory frequency is 3200 Mhz, the capacity is 32 G, and the graphics card is RTX3070. The computer’s operating system is Windows 10. In the experimental part, the algorithm is simulated and verified by Matlab 2016b. The input and output of the program are standard video images in AVI format. The experiment part verifies that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect and track the target of martial arts athletes through subjective visual analysis and objective evaluation indicators.Different feature parts of the human body can be abstracted into 18 feature points, and the human skeleton composed of these feature points can reflect the posture of the human body at the moment. The angle value between specific joints can provide a reference for judging the accuracy of a person’s actions, without being affected by different body types, skin color, clothing, and other characteristics. This paper will use this feature for action comparison.After the image is processed by Open Pose, the coordinates of 18 feature points of the human body can be obtained, as shown in Figure5. In some cases, the part of the human body in the plane picture cannot be completely presented, which will cause the corresponding coordinate of the feature point to be “None,” which is the case in Figure 4. However, this experiment mainly focuses on the human torso skeleton, and the unrecognized eye feature points have little effect on the comparison of actions, so the facial data can be ignored.Figure 5
Human skeleton restored by openpose.The obtained human skeleton picture is shown in Figure5. The length between two points can be obtained by calculating the Euclidean distance and then using the law of cosines to calculate the angle value of the angle between the specific joints that reflect the movement of the human body. This paper uses this method to process the standard action pictures, respectively and obtains the joint angle value of the human skeleton in the picture, which is used as a comparison template. Then, the action picture of the trainer is input that needs to be judged and also gets the joint angle value.The preintercepted key frames of the practitioner’s actions are processed, and the human skeleton data containing multiple joint angles is obtained in this picture, as shown in Figure6. At the same time, the human body in the picture will be marked with a skeleton structure containing key points, as shown in Figure 7. After that, the output data are compared with the standard motion data that has been processed in the same way in advance, and it can be roughly judged whether the trainer’s motion is standardized.Figure 6
The input picture of the practitioner’s actions.Figure 7
Skeleton structure of practitioners.However, in individual cases, there is a problem with the restoration of the human skeleton by Open Pose. For example, when the trainer’s hand is raised vertically above the head, the algorithm will fail to restore the skeleton of the arm part. This is because Open Pose relies on two known skeleton points to generate a PAF connection during pose estimation. If one of the two skeleton points does not exist or the recognition fails, the PAF label will not be generated. Therefore, it is speculated that when the trainer’s hand is raised above the head, only the wrist joint is identified, and the elbow joint fails to be identified, so the PAF connection is not generated, but this connection actually exists and should be generated, as shown in Figure8.Figure 8
Recognition probability distribution of different poses.


## 6. Conclusion

In this paper, aiming at the recognition and comparison of traditional martial arts movements, the Open Pose algorithm is used to process the key frames of trainers and standard movements, restore the human skeleton, and obtain the human joint angle values; the comparison of the two has verified the feasibility of Open Pose and the comparison algorithm in the teaching of martial arts movements and has good practical significance and practical value for promoting martial arts teaching, inheritance, and promotion. This paper also has the following shortcomings: the samples used in this experiment are too single, and only a few specified human actions are identified and compared; in the future, the scope of the sample should be expanded to cover more martial arts varieties, moves, and movements, in order to explore the applicability of this method in the field of traditional martial arts movement identification and comparison.



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*Source: 2214724-2022-08-11.xml*