Visual Sentences for Pose Retrieval Over Low-Resolution Cross-Media Dance Collections

We describe a system for matching human posture (pose) across a large cross-media archive of dance footage spanning nearly 100 years, comprising digitized photographs and videos of rehearsals and performances. This footage presents unique challenges due to its age, quality and diversity. We propose a forest-like pose representation combining visual structure (self-similarity) descriptors over multiple scales, without explicitly detecting limb positions which would be infeasible for our data. We explore two complementary multi-scale representations, applying passage retrieval and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) techniques inspired by the text retrieval domain, to the problem of pose matching. The result is a robust system capable of quickly searching large cross-media collections for similarity to a visually specified query pose. We evaluate over a cross-section of the UK National Research Centre for Dance's (UK-NRCD), and the Siobhan Davies Replay's (SDR) digital dance archives, using visual queries supplied by dance professionals. We demonstrate significant performance improvements over two base-lines: classical single and multi-scale bag of visual words (BoVW) and spatial pyramid kernel (SPK) matching .