Adaptation of Grouping Structure Analysis in GTTM to Hierarchical Segmentation of Dance Motion

In this paper, the authors propose the adaptation of the rules used in the grouping structure analysis in Lerdahl and Jackendoff's “A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM)” to dance motion analysis. The success of the adaptation realizes the segmentation of dance motion in a hierarchical fashion. The analysis method obtained by the trial of the above adaptation consists of the following procedures. A motion-capture data stream of a dance is first divided into a sequence of events by piecewise linear regression. The hierarchical structure of groups each of which consists of a sequence of the events is then extracted by applying the grouping rules adapted to dance motion analysis. The above method is applied to motion-data streams acquired by motion capture systems. The obtained results indicate the following advantages: (1) The structure of hierarchical segmentation is precisely extracted in response to the characteristic of an analyzed dance. (2) The extraction of the hierarchical segmentation provides the possibility of the development of a technique distinguishing the oversegmentation from regular boundaries. (3) The possibility of utilizing the information of hierarchical segmentation for the comparison of dance performances is suggested.