Detecting Hermit Statues Depicting a Thai Massage (Nuad Boran) in Wat Pho Using Convolutional Neural Network
Sathit Prasomphan, Settawit Namwongsa, Naruchon Ngamkasem · 2024
Thai massage, known for its holistic approach to healing and relaxation, has gained popularity worldwide. However, despite its numerous benefits, the practice faces several challenges that hinder its accessibility and effectiveness. Wat Pho, renowned for its Thai medicine school and as the birthplace of traditional Thai massage, provides a unique experience with a historical hermit statue displaying exercise postures. To preserve this history and offer a modern experience, a mobile application was developed which integrated the searching of Hermit statues depicting Thai massage poses in Wat Pho with convolutional neural network and displayed the type of this posing in the 3D augment reality (AR). To detect a posture of hermit statue display in this research, the convolutional neural network was introduced by using YOLOv8 model network, which is the latest library for object detection. In a machine learning experiment, a convolutional neural networks to detect the hermit statue was successfully employed, achieving a 90.52 percent accuracy in classifying its exercise posture. The use of YOLOv8, a state-of-the-art object detection model, for classifying Hermit statues depicting Thai massage poses in Wat Pho enhances the mobile application’s functionality by enabling automatic identification and classification of relevant statues.