Efficient Motion Retrieval in Large Motion Databases

There has been a recent paradigm shift in the computer animation industry with an increasing use of pre-recorded motion for animating virtual characters. A fundamental requirement to using motion capture data is an efficient method for indexing and retrieving motions. In this paper, we propose a flexible, efficient method for searching arbitrarily complex motions in large motion databases. Motions are encoded using keys which represent a wide array of structural, geometric and, dynamic features of human motion. Keys provide a representative search space for indexing motions and users can specify sequences of key values as well as multiple combination of key sequences to search for complex motions. We use a trie-based data structure to provide an efficient mapping from key sequences to motions. The search times (even on a single CPU) are very fast, opening the possibility of using large motion data sets in real-time applications

Switching Partners: Dancing with the Ontological Engineers

Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on our ability to preserve the data that already exists. Here we explore recent technological developments that are designed to counteract such problems by allowing information to be retrieved across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic and technological boundaries. Software applications such as the ones envisaged here will enable speedier recovery of data and facilitate its analysis in ways that will assist both archiving of and research on dance

Whoever Said Change Was Good: The Transforming Body of the Disney Villainess

This dissertation examines female figures in Disney animation through the lens of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), a system for observing and articulating movement qualities. Drawing from six major films released between 1937 and 2010, I focus my inquiry on how the bodies and movement of Disneys villainesses reflect and/or perpetuate cultural imaginaries of women. I identify the influence of several cultural tropes of femininity, including fairy-tale archetypes, ballet conventions, and the Hollywood femme fatale, and explore how they constellate social understandings of age, beauty, and desirability. Coalescing around the theme of physical transformation, the study investigates how consistent movement patterns both support character animation and reflect gender ideologies encoded in the bodies of these wicked women. Through a methodology grounded in LMA and drawing from dance studies, feminist theory, and Disney scholarship, I interrogate popular conceptions of women and evil, articulate how movement contributes to cultural meaning, and demonstrate LMAs value to cultural analysis and animation

Multimedia

The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

On the analysis of musical performance by computer

Existing automatic methods of analysing musical performance can generally be described as music-oriented DSP analysis. However, this merely identifies attributes, or artefacts which can be found within the performance. This information, though invaluable, is not an analysis of the performance process. The process of performance first involves an analysis of the score (whether from a printed sheet or from memory), and through this analysis, the performer decides how to perform the piece. Thus, an analysis of the performance process requires an analysis of the performance attributes and artefacts in the context of the musical score. With this type analysis it is possible to ask profound questions such as “why or when does a performer use this technique”. The work presented in this thesis provides the tools which are required to investigate these performance issues. A new computer representation, Performance Markup Language (PML) is presented which combines the domains of the musical score, performance information and analytical structures. This representation provides the framework with which information within these domains can be cross-referenced internally, and the markup of information in external files. Most importantly, the rep resentation defines the relationship between performance events and the corresponding objects within the score, thus facilitating analysis of performance information in the context of the score and analyses of the score. To evaluate the correspondences between performance notes and notes within the score, the performance must be analysed using a score-performance matching algorithm. A new score-performance matching algorithm is presented in this document which is based on Dynamic Programming. In score-performance matching there are situations where dynamic programming alone is not sufficient to accurately identify correspondences. The algorithm presented here makes use of analyses of both the score and the performance to overcome the inherent shortcomings of the DP method and to improve the accuracy and robustness of DP matching in the presence of performance errors and expressive timing. Together with the musical score and performance markup, the correspondences identified by the matching algorithm provide the minimum information required to investigate musical performance, and forms the foundation of a PML representation. The Microtonalism project investigated the issues surrounding the performance of microtonal music on conventional (i.e. non microtonal specific) instruments, namely voice. This included the automatic analysis of vocal performances to extract information regarding pitch accuracy. This was possible using tools developed using the performance representation and the matching algorithm

Music information retrieval: conceptuel framework, annotation and user behaviour

Understanding music is a process both based on and influenced by the knowledge and experience of the listener. Although content-based music retrieval has been given increasing attention in recent years, much of the research still focuses on bottom-up retrieval techniques. In order to make a music information retrieval system appealing and useful to the user, more effort should be spent on constructing systems that both operate directly on the encoding of the physical energy of music and are flexible with respect to users’ experiences. This thesis is based on a user-centred approach, taking into account the mutual relationship between music as an acoustic phenomenon and as an expressive phenomenon. The issues it addresses are: the lack of a conceptual framework, the shortage of annotated musical audio databases, the lack of understanding of the behaviour of system users and shortage of user-dependent knowledge with respect to high-level features of music. In the theoretical part of this thesis, a conceptual framework for content-based music information retrieval is defined. The proposed conceptual framework - the first of its kind - is conceived as a coordinating structure between the automatic description of low-level music content, and the description of high-level content by the system users. A general framework for the manual annotation of musical audio is outlined as well. A new methodology for the manual annotation of musical audio is introduced and tested in case studies. The results from these studies show that manually annotated music files can be of great help in the development of accurate analysis tools for music information retrieval. Empirical investigation is the foundation on which the aforementioned theoretical framework is built. Two elaborate studies involving different experimental issues are presented. In the first study, elements of signification related to spontaneous user behaviour are clarified. In the second study, a global profile of music information retrieval system users is given and their description of high-level content is discussed. This study has uncovered relationships between the users’ demographical background and their perception of expressive and structural features of music. Such a multi-level approach is exceptional as it included a large sample of the population of real users of interactive music systems. Tests have shown that the findings of this study are representative of the targeted population. Finally, the multi-purpose material provided by the theoretical background and the results from empirical investigations are put into practice in three music information retrieval applications: a prototype of a user interface based on a taxonomy, an annotated database of experimental findings and a prototype semantic user recommender system. Results are presented and discussed for all methods used. They show that, if reliably generated, the use of knowledge on users can significantly improve the quality of music content analysis. This thesis demonstrates that an informed knowledge of human approaches to music information retrieval provides valuable insights, which may be of particular assistance in the development of user-friendly, content-based access to digital music collections

Semantics for virtual humans

Population of Virtual Worlds with Virtual Humans is increasing rapidly by people who want to create a virtual life parallel to the real one (i.e. Second Life). The evolution of technology is smoothly providing the necessary elements to increase realism within these virtual worlds by creating believable Virtual Humans. However, creating the amount of resources needed to succeed this believability is a difficult task, mainly because of the complexity of the creation process of Virtual Humans. Even though there are many existing available resources, their reusability is difficult because there is not enough information provided to evaluate if a model contains the desired characteristics to be reused. Additionally, the knowledge involved in the creation of Virtual Humans is not well known, nor well disseminated. There are several different creation techniques, different software components, and several processes to carry out before having a Virtual Human capable of populating a virtual environment. The creation of Virtual Humans involves: a geometrical representation with an internal control structure, the motion synthesis with different animation techniques, higher level controllers and descriptors to simulate human-like behavior such individuality, cognition, interaction capabilities, etc. All these processes require the expertise from different fields of knowledge such as mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, design, etc. Furthermore, there is neither common framework nor common understanding of how elements involved in the creation, development, and interaction of Virtual Humans features are done. Therefore, there is a need for describing (1) existing resources, (2) Virtual Human's composition and features, (3) a creation pipeline and (4) the different levels/fields of knowledge comprehended. This thesis presents an explicit representation of the Virtual Humans and their features to provide a conceptual framework that will interest to all people involved in the creation and development of these characters. This dissertation focuses in a semantic description of Virtual Humans. The creation of a semantic description involves gathering related knowledge, agreement among experts in the definition of concepts, validation of the ontology design, etc. In this dissertation all these procedures are presented, and an Ontology for Virtual Humans is described in detail together with the validations that conducted to the resulted ontology. The goal of creating such ontology is to promote reusability of existing resources; to create a shared knowledge of the creation and composition of Virtual Humans; and to support new research of the fields involved in the development of believable Virtual Humans and virtual environments. Finally, this thesis presents several developments that aim to demonstrate the ontology usability and reusability. These developments serve particularly to support the research on specialized knowledge of Virtual Humans, the population of virtual environments, and improve the believability of these characters

Proceedings of the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the SMC2010 - 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 21st - July 24th 2010