Let’s all dance: Enhancing amateur dance motions

Abstract Professional dance is characterized by high impulsiveness, elegance, and aesthetic beauty. In order to reach the desired professionalism, it requires years of long and exhausting practice, good physical condition, musicality, but also, a good understanding of choreography. Capturing dance motions and transferring them to digital avatars is commonly used in the film and entertainment industries. However, so far, access to high-quality dance data is very limited, mainly due to the many practical difficulties in capturing the movements of dancers, making it prohibitive for large-scale data acquisition. In this paper, we present a model that enhances the professionalism of amateur dance movements, allowing movement quality to be improved in both spatial and temporal domains. Our model consists of a dance-to-music alignment stage responsible for learning the optimal temporal alignment path between dance and music, and a dance-enhancement stage that injects features of professionalism in both spatial and temporal domains. To learn a homogeneous distribution and credible mapping between the heterogeneous professional and amateur datasets, we generate amateur data from professional dances taken from the AIST++ dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by comparing it with two baseline motion transfer methods via thorough qualitative visual controls, quantitative metrics, and a perceptual study. We also provide temporal and spatial module analysis to examine the mechanisms and necessity of key components of our framework.