Abstract:The growing interest in automated movement analysis has presented new challenges in recognition of complex human activities including dance. This study focuses on dance style recognition using features extracted using Laban Movement Analysis. Previous studies for dance style recognition often focus on cross-frame movement analysis, which limits the ability to capture temporal context and dynamic transitions between movements. This gap highlights the need for a method that can add temporal context to LMA features. For this, we introduce a novel pipeline which combines 3D pose estimation, 3D human mesh reconstruction, and floor aware body modeling to effectively extract LMA features. To address the temporal limitation, we propose a sliding window approach that captures movement evolution across time in features. These features are then used to train various machine learning methods for classification, and their explainability explainable AI methods to evaluate the contribution of each feature to classification performance. Our proposed method achieves a highest classification accuracy of 99.18\% which shows that the addition of temporal context significantly improves dance style recognition performance.
Abstract:This paper presents a novel framework for emotion recognition in contemporary dance by improving existing Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) feature descriptors and introducing robust, novel descriptors that capture both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the movement. Our approach extracts expressive characteristics from 3D keypoints data of professional dancers performing contemporary dance under various emotional states, and trains multiple classifiers, including Random Forests and Support Vector Machines. Additionally, we provide in-depth explanation of features and their impact on model predictions using explainable machine learning methods. Overall, our study improves emotion recognition in contemporary dance and offers promising applications in performance analysis, dance training, and human--computer interaction, with a highest accuracy of 96.85\%.
Abstract:3D human body shape and pose estimation from RGB images is a challenging problem with potential applications in augmented/virtual reality, healthcare and fitness technology and virtual retail. Recent solutions have focused on three types of inputs: i) single images, ii) multi-view images and iii) videos. In this study, we surveyed and compared 3D body shape and pose estimation methods for contemporary dance and performing arts, with a special focus on human body pose and dressing, camera viewpoint, illumination conditions and background conditions. We demonstrated that multi-frame methods, such as PHALP, provide better results than single-frame method for pose estimation when dancers are performing contemporary dances.
Abstract:Symmetry is one of the significant visual properties inside an image plane, to identify the geometrically balanced structures through real-world objects. Existing symmetry detection methods rely on descriptors of the local image features and their neighborhood behavior, resulting incomplete symmetrical axis candidates to discover the mirror similarities on a global scale. In this paper, we propose a new reflection symmetry detection scheme, based on a reliable edge-based feature extraction using Log-Gabor filters, plus an efficient voting scheme parameterized by their corresponding textural and color neighborhood information. Experimental evaluation on four single-case and three multiple-case symmetry detection datasets validates the superior achievement of the proposed work to find global symmetries inside an image.
Abstract:Symmetry is an important composition feature by investigating similar sides inside an image plane. It has a crucial effect to recognize man-made or nature objects within the universe. Recent symmetry detection approaches used a smoothing kernel over different voting maps in the polar coordinate system to detect symmetry peaks, which split the regions of symmetry axis candidates in inefficient way. We propose a reliable voting representation based on weighted linear-directional kernel density estimation, to detect multiple symmetries over challenging real-world and synthetic images. Experimental evaluation on two public datasets demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed algorithm to detect global symmetry axes respect to the major image shapes.