Date of Award

8-2021

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Department/Program

Computer Science

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Jonathan Ventura

Advisor Department

Computer Science

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

My work focuses on taking a single person as input and predicting the intentional movement of one dance partner based on the other dance partner's movement. Human pose estimation has been applied to dance and computer vision, but many existing applications focus on a single individual or multiple individuals performing. Currently there are very few works that focus specifically on dance couples combined with pose prediction. This thesis is applicable to the entertainment and gaming industry by training people to dance with a virtual dance partner.

Many existing interactive or virtual dance partners require a motion capture system, multiple cameras or a robot which creates an expensive cost. This thesis does not use a motion capture system and combines OpenPose with swing dance YouTube videos to create a virtual dance partner. By taking in the current dancer's moves as input, the system predicts the dance partner's corresponding moves in the video frames.

In order to create a virtual dance partner, datasets that contain information about the skeleton keypoints are necessary to predict a dance partner's pose. There are existing dance datasets for a specific type of dance, but these datasets do not cover swing dance. Furthermore, the dance datasets that do include swing have a limited number of videos. The contribution of this thesis is a large swing dataset that contains three different types of swing dance: East Coast, Lindy Hop and West Coast. I also provide a basic framework to extend the work to create a real-time and interactive dance partner.

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