Extraction of Motion Characteristics in Dances by Statistical Analysis of Joint Motions

Abstract

In this paper, the authors attempt to develop a technique for the analysis of the motions of dances having no stylized motion structure, focusing on joint motions. The variance-covariance matrix given by the statistical analysis of the time-series data of joint motions is selected for the evaluation index characterizing dance motions. The application of the derived evaluation index to the representation of dissimilarity between dances is shown to be effective when the whole commonness appearing in both the dances compared should be considered. It is also confirmed that the application of multidimensional scaling (MDS) with the orthogonal rotation of coordinate axes is effective to extract the distribution feature of a database of dances. The evaluation items characterizing all the dances belonging to the database are automatically extracted by the analysis of correlation between the coordinate axes given by MDS and the elements of the variance-covariance matrix.