Recognition of ballet micro-movements for use in choreography

Computer vision as an entire field has a wide and diverse range of applications. The specific application for this project was in the realm of dance, notably ballet and choreography. This project was proof-of-concept for a choreography assistance tool used to recognize and record dance movements demonstrated by a choreographer. Keeping the commercial arena in mind, the Kinect from Microsoft was chosen as the imaging hardware, and a pilot set chosen to verify recognition feasibility. Before implementing a classifier, all training and test data was transformed to a more applicable representation scheme to only pass the important aspects to the classifier to distinguish moves for the pilot set. In addition, several classification algorithms using the Nearest Neighbor (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) methods were tested and compared from a single dictionary as well as on several different subjects. The results were promising given the framework of the project, and several new expansions of this work are proposed.