Human Movement Analysis for Interactive Dance

In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the human movement analysis research at the Arts, Media and Engineering program, Arizona State University, and its applications in interactive dance. A family of robust algorithms has been developed to analyze dancers’ movement at multiple temporal and spatial levels from a number of perspectives such as marker distributions, joint angles, body silhouettes as well as weight distributions to conduct reliable dancer tracking, posture and gesture recognition. Multiple movement sensing modalities have been used and sometimes fused in our current research, including marker-based motion capture system, pressure sensitive floor and video cameras. Some of the developed algorithms have been successfully used in real life dance performances.