Detecting dance motion structure using body components and turning motions

This paper presents a novel method for robust dance motion structure detection. In the japanese folk dance domain, teachers created illustrations of dance poses. These poses characterize the most important movements of a dance. So far there is no simple and reliable extraction method which can extract all poses as shown in these drawings. We use these poses for the Task Model (TM) in the context of Learning from Observation (LFO). LFO which is a well known technique for successful human to robot motion mapping, consists of tasks (what to do) and skills (how to do). We propose a novel approach, to extract special motions from a dance, called turning motions useful for skill mapping in the LFO paradigm. Furthermore, we use a modified version of this approach, to detect all poses as shown in the drawings, called turning poses. To achieve this we observe both forearms at the same time and analyze their movement in different 2-D coordinate planes. We evaluate the parameters with and without a weighting function where we minimize acceleration, velocity and power. We successfully demonstrate this novel method using two very different japanese folk dances and discuss further implications of this work in respect to the LFO paradigm and dances of other domains.