What kind of information is relevant to
recognize expressive gestures?
How can we extract them?
What kind of processing is needed in order to obtain qualitative information
about the expressive content conveyed by the users?
These are some questions that wait for an answer from
research on expressive content analysis.
The work on the analysis side is intended to investigate
problems such as
(i) the choice of sensors systems, eventually developed
within the project, providing the analysis algorithms with low level information
about the users and the environment,
(ii) the development of algorithms to process such low
level information in order to identify some higher level parameters related
with the expressiveness conveyed by the users,
(iii) the development of models and algorithms for the
extraction of high level, qualitative information about the recognized expressive
content. Further, the analysis of expressive gestures from the users has to
be performed both in the particular modality (e.g. recognize expressive information
in human movements and gesture) and from a multimodal perspective (e.g. how
to use information coming from the analysis of expressive content in human
movement to perform a better and deeper analysis of expressive content in
music performances and vice versa).
A
coordinated research work has been carried out on analysis of expressive
gestures in dance, music, and visual media. The work mainly consisted in (i)
individuating (in year 1) and further extensing (in years 2 and 3) a “palette” of
expressive cues for audio (music) and video (dance), (ii) performing
statistical analysis on the values of expressive cues extracted from reference
microdances and audio excerpts, (iii) validating the obtained results through
spectators’ ratings, (iv) using of the extracted values in interactive
performances and events (e.g., for automatic generation of audio and
visual content depending on expressive gesture analysis).
Results have been published on first-class international journals and in the
proceedings of several international conferences.
As a concrete output the research work produced a collection of software
modules for analysis and synthesis of expressive gestures, integrated or
connected in the MEGA System Environment. |