Beat synchronous dance animation based on visual analysis of human motion and audio analysis of music tempo

Abstract

We present a framework that generates beat synchronous dance animation based on the analysis of both visual and audio data. First, the articulated motion of a dancer is captured based on markerless visual observations obtained by a multicamera system. We propose and employ a new method for the temporal segmentation of such motion data into the periods of dance. Next, we use a beat tracking algorithm to estimate the pulse related to the tempo of a piece of music. Given an input music that is of the same genre as the one corresponding to the visually observed dance, we automatically produce a beat synchronous dance animation of a virtual character. The proposed approach has been validated with extensive experiments performed on a data set containing a variety on traditional Greek/Cretan dances and the corresponding music. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.