Abstract
The Awa Dance festival is one of the most famous traditional festivals in Tokushima Prefecture. Because the Awa-Odori dance is simple, beginners can easily learn the dance. However, it is very difficult to dance as beautifully as an expert dancer. An important factor in dancing the Awa-Odori dance beautifully is the motion of the hand and the arm. In this paper, the authors propose a method for evaluating the beauty of an Awa-Odori dancer's hand. As the first step in the proposed method, the motion of a dancer's hand was recorded in an image sequence using the optical flow. Next, four features effecting the beauty of the motion were calculated from the optical flow. Using this method, smoothness, energy, rhythm, and compactness were identified as four features. Finally, the four features are unified and the Awa-Odori dance is graded. This paper presents the findings of experiments conducted in order to verify the validity of the proposed method. Using this method, expert dancers received high scores while beginners received low scores.
