2009 IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC 2009) Patiala, India, 6–7 March 2009 Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Dance Media Environments Balakrishnan Ramadoss Department of Computer Applns National Institute of Tech Trichy 620015, TN, INDIA brama@nitt.edu Rajkumar Kannan Department of Computer Science Bishop Heber College Trichy 620017, TN, INDIA rajkumarkannan@yahoo.co.in Frederic Andres National Institute of Informatics University of Advanced Studies Tokyo, JAPAN andres@nii.ac.jp Abstract - Recent advances in hardware sophistication related to graphics display, audio and video devices made available a and retrieval large number of multimedia and hypermedia applications. These multimedia applications need to store and retrieve the different forms of media like text, hypertext, graphics, still images, animations, audio and video. Dance is one of the important cultural forms of a nation and dance video is one such multimedia types. Archiving and retrieving the required semantics from these dance media collections is a crucial and demanding multimedia application. This paper summarizes the difference dance video archival techniques and systems. Keywords: Multimedia, Culture Media, Metadata archival and retrieval systems, MPEG-7, XML. I. INTRODUCTION Recent advances in hardware sophistication related to graphics display, audio and video devices made available a large number of multimedia and hypermedia applications. In a scenario, one may want to digitize and store one’s favorite dance presentations and later on view, say for instance, all solo dance pieces in which a particular dancerX was involved [16]. These multimedia applications need to store and retrieve the different forms of media like text, hypertext, graphics, still images, animations, audio and video. Multimedia database can be viewed as a controlled collection of multimedia data items. Multimedia database system, for instance dance video database, would then provide the support for multimedia data types, besides facilities for the creation, authoring, storage, access, query and control of the multimedia database. Dance generally refers to human movements either used as a form of expression or presented in a social, spiritual or performance setting. Dance is one of the important cultural forms of a nation. The other cultural forms are art, music, and sculptures. Preserving this cultural heritage is very important for the future generations of dance community. This paper surveys the various dance video archival and retrieval systems. The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2 deals with the dance video archival methods. The various dance analysis and retrieval systems are discussed in section 3. Section 4 deals with the challenges of Dance Analysis and Retrieval Systems (DARS). Finally section 5 concludes the paper. II. DANCE VIDEO ARCHIVAL METHODS A dance can be archived using human memories, dance notations and digital mediums. In ancient times dancers passed the knowledge of the dance verbally to the following generations. However, such knowledge was limited to the memory of the dancers and hence many dance productions had been lost due to this fact unfortunately. Encyclopedia Britannica defines a dance notation as the recording of dance movement through the use of written symbols. Since 16 th century, dance notations are used to archive choreographies and to resurrect the dance by dancers and choreographers. A dance notation, similar to musical notes, is a symbolic form of representing the movements of the dancers using various graphical symbols such as lines, circles, rectangles, squares, bars etc. The primary use of a dance notation is the documentation, analysis and reconstruction of choreography. Many different forms of dance notations such as stick figure have been created, but the two main systems used in Western culture are: Labanotation Benesh notation Labanotation [1] is a standardized system for analyzing and recording any human movement. The original inventor is Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958), an important figure in European modern dance. He published this notation first in 1928 as Kinetographie in the first issue of Schrifttanz. Several people continued the development of the notation. In Labanotation, it is possible to record every kind of human motion. Labanotation is not connected to a singular, specific style of dance. The basis is the natural human motion, and every change from this natural human motion (e.g. turned-out legs) has to be specifically written down in the notation as shown in Figs. 1-3. Benesh [1] movement notation invented by Benesh is particularly prominent in ballet dance and was designed to write the whereabouts of a dancer on the stage, the direction the dancer facing, the positions of the limbs, and the details of the head, hand and foot. Since dancing has movement, Benesh also notates the movement by recording the 3599