Video Analysis

I am a big supporter of Open Access publishing, but for various reasons some of my publications are not openly available by default. This is the case for the chapter Methods for Studying Music-Related Body Motion that I have contributed to the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology. I am very happy to announce that the embargo on the book ran out today, which means that a pre-print version of my chapter is finally freely available in UiO’s digital repository....

Continuing my explorations of FFmpeg for video visualization, today I came across this very nice blog post on creating “pixel array” images of videos. Here the idea is to reduce every single frame into only one pixel, and to plot this next to each other on a line. Of course, I wanted to try this out myself. I find that creating motiongrams or videograms is a good way to visualize the content of videos....

I am happy to announce a new version of VideoAnalysis, a standalone application for OSX and Windows for creating visualizations and extract motion features from video files. VideoAnalysis was developed as a standalone version of the Musical Gestures Toolbox. I began working on the toolbox back in 2004, as a collection of modules for Max/MSP/Jitter. Then some people asked me to make a standalone version with some of the core functionality....

In some recent posts I have explored the creation of motiongrams and average images, multi-exposure displays, and image masks. In this blog post I will explore different ways of generating keyframe displays using the very handy command line tool FFmpeg. As in the previous posts, I will use a contemporary dance video from the AIST Dance Video Database as an example: The first attempt is to create a 3x3 grid image by just sampling frames from the original image....

I have for several years been collaborating with researchers at NTNU in Trondheim on developing video analysis tools for studying the movement patterns of infants. This has resulted in several papers, international testing (and a TV documentary). Now there is a new paper out, with some very successful data testing the reliability of the video analysis method: Reference: Valle, Susanne Collier, Ragnhild Støen, Rannei Sæther, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, and Lars Adde....

One of the most satisfying things of being a researcher, is to see that ideas, theories, methods, software and other things that you come up with, are useful to others. Today I received the master’s thesis of Per Erik Walslag, titled Are you jumping or bouncing? A case-study of jumping and bouncing in classical ballet using the motiongram computer program, in which he has made excellent use of my motiongram technique and my VideoAnalysis software....

I was in Hamburg last week, teaching at the International Summer Shool in Systematic Musicology (ISSSM). While there, I was able to test a newly acquired high-speed video camera (Phantom V711) at the Department of Musicology. [caption id=“attachment_1988” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] The beautiful building of the Department of Musicology in Hamburg[/caption] [caption id=“attachment_1987” align=“alignnone” width=“300”] They have some really cool drawings in the ceiling at the entrance of the Department of Musicology in Hamburg....

Victoria Johnson has posted a video of the performance of our piece Transformation on Youtube: The video is from Victoria’s final performance as part of her research fellowship in the arts(PhD-equivalent), which happened Monday 28 March 2011 at the Norwegian Academy of Music. As I wrote earlier this year: Transformation a piece where we are using video analysis to control sound selection and spatialisation. We have been developing the setup and piece during the last couple of years, and performed variations of the piece at MIC, the Opera house and at the music academy last year....

After working happily with FW-products for many years, the recent trend of disappearing FW-ports have made me look for USB-based solutions. For hard drives the switch has been easy, and I also recently got my first USB-based sound card. The hardest part has been to figure out how to handle video cameras. I have been using various Unibrain cameras for years, and have gotten used to the simplicity of being able to hook up multiple cameras to one computer....

We have slowly been moving into our new lab spaces over the last weeks. The official opening of the labs is scheduled for Friday 26 September, but we had a pre-opening “Open lab” for the new music students last week, and here are some of the pictures shot by Anne Cathrine Wesnes during the presentation. Here I am telling the students a little about our new research group, and showing the main room:...