Research Activities

Professor Hachimura has been conducting researches in the field of applications of information technology in the Humanities for the last couple of decades. He has participated in the management of the SIG named "Computers and the Humanities" in Information Processing Society Japan, IPSJ, all the way. After he transfered to Ritsumeikan University, he has been collaborating with Humanities researchers mostly in the Graduate School of Letters. He is acting as a sub-leader of Global COE Program called "Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures", which is a collaborative research program among researchers in Humanities and information technologies. He also acts as a group leader of the "Digital Archiving Technology Research Group." For these reasons we are having several research topics related to the Humanities research.

[1]Analysis of Human Body Motion in Dance

One of the major topics is a digital archiving of dance. This include not only a measurement of dance motions, but also analyses of human body motions during dance. We have been using an optical-type motion capturing system for the measurement of body motion. The targets of archiving are mainly Japanese traditional dances, for instance Noh-play, Kabuki-dance, Nihon-buyo and other folk dances. However we are doing capturing and analysis of dances in other cultures, as well as contemporary dances. Analyses include recognition of dances and/or dancers, similarity retrieval of dance body motions, and extraction of Kansei (emotion or impression) from dances.

Feature Extraction from Dance Motion

For the recognition of dances we have to extract several feature values, considering what is the characteristic motion, what kind of motion or which parts of the body characterize the dance motion as a whole. We have been doing this research on Nihon-buyo.

Similarity Based Retrieval of Dance Motion Data

By the use of motion capture systems, we have been able to capture various dances. However, as the amount of captured data continues to increase in the future, the management of these data will become a serious issue. For this reason, a database system becomes necessary for motion captured data. However, what is required here is the realization of a system with "similarity-based retrieval" of motion data based on the similarity between body motions rather than by just using annotation information described by character data.

3D CG Character Animation of Dance

Creation of CG character animation of dances is not necessarily a principal research topic, because we can make it by using commercially available software tools and motion data, although it requires some expertise. However, because representing traditional dances faithfully including its costume and environments is one of the major concerns in digital archiving, we have to collaborate with humanities researchers in this field.

KANSEI Information Processing in Dance

A person watching dance receives various impressions from the performer's body motion. In effective communications among humans, and also between human and robots in the future, this kind of nonverbal information related to impression or emotion is important. A Japanese word KANSEI, whose meaning is close to sensibilities, has been used to express human's receptivity of information related to impressions or feelings. We are undertaking investigations of the association of physical feature values acquired from motion capture data with KANSEI value obtained by the psychological rating experiment.

Virtual Dance Collaboration

This research topic has less relation to the archiving of traditional Japanese dances. However, in order to pursue the essence of dance, we may take a approach called analysis by synthesis. We are developing a virtual dance collaboration system, in which a real dancer collaborate with a virtual dancer in the virtual environment. The real dancer's body motion is observed by using motion capture and the reactive motion of the virtual dancer will be determined by analyzing the real dancer's motion and its KANSEI feature values. We look for suitable methods of analyzing motions and determining reactive motions in order to realize a good collaboration.

Data Processing of Accompanying Music for Dance

In the virtual dance collaboration mentioned above, accompanying instrumental music also plays an important role. We are trying to extract KANSEI factors from the music and to use this information for making a modification of motions accordingly for the virtual dancer.

Processing for Dance Notation System Labanotation

Currently we can use motion capture system for recording human body motion during dance. However there has been a graphical dance notation system called Labanotation used in the Western dance community. We are doing a research about a computerized system for inputting and editing the notation. We have already developed the system named LabanEditor. We can generate a 3D character animation from the notation.

Analysis of Biomedical Information during Dancing

We have installed sensor systems to measure the human biomedical signal which can be used during motion capturing. Electro-myogram (EMG) is the most typical one. We have already made an analysis of finding difference in muscle activities during traditional dance among novice and experienced dancers.

[2]Image Analysis

Content Based Image Retrieval

In digital archives, large image databases having vast amount of paintings and historical documents have been used. When retrieving images from the database, a function of similarity-based content retrieval is very essential. We have already developed a prototype system using information about color distribution, which has been used in Ukiyo-e archives released at Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University.

Image Analysis for Ukiyoe Paintings

In Art Research Center at our University have an digital archive of a collection of Ukiyo-e paintings. We are now undertaking an image analysis of these images. One of the major research is extraction of automatic extraction and identification of "Rakkan", namely painters signatures, from paintings. The purpose of this research is to support an attribution of the paintings.

Document Image Analysis for Historical Books

During Edo period (17th-19th Century) vast amount of books were published and read in Japan. These include novels, philosophy books, encyclopedia, agricultural books, and religious books, etc. Among them, some of the famous books have been transcribed and published in modern age, but many are not exposed to the public these days. These historical books are also subjected to digital archiving. The page images are taken with scanners or cameras to be made open to the public. This research aims to analyze these document images with image processing technologies. Structural analysis of documents and extraction of some specific character images from the page images are major research topics. We have already developed a system for extracting each character as an image and make an index of these character images.

KANSEI Information Processing for Image Materials

Not only for dance body motions but for the analysis of images, we investigate the Kansei information processing approaches. This topic includes the image retrieval by specifying some impression words such as "vivid", "clear" and "light".

[3]Application of IT in Humanities

Digital Humanities

Humanities including history, literature, archaeology, ethnology and arts are treasure houses of information. Researches have been conducted by using information including not only text and numerical information but also various multi-media information such as images, paintings, figures and audio materials. However handling of these kinds of multi-media information with IT has not been done actively so far. Today, with the advent of "Digital Humanities" in Western countries, there is a growing tendency for globally sharing vast amount of these kinds of multi-media information based on the WEB environment and utilizing them for Humanities research. So far, Humanities research has its own characteristics as that only a few specified researchers, who had a privilege to access the rare original materials, could conduct research on these topics. However, from now on, importance of global joint studies based on a large amount of digital data on the net will increase. As stated above, since we are participating in the project of Global COE program "Digital Humanities Center for Japanese Arts and Cultures", we are exploiting the possibilities of developing tools which could be used in "Digital Humanities". We have an intention to deal with not only the topics related to dancing, paintings and historical books, but other broad range of topics related to the information processing in the Humanities. Our targets include not only restricted to the historical and/or purely aesthetic ones, but also the various topics concerning contemporary cultures and arts.

Challenging Approach from IT

Information in the Humanities is not necessarily suited to computer processing, but by coping with this we will be able to understand the problem of handling actual information and this experience will provide an important feedback to the future information science and technology.

Digital Museum

Museums for arts, history and cultures play an important role in information distribution within the country and abroad. We can use our products on digital archives for making a global collaboration and an exchange of data among museums. We are participating a national project of 'Digital Museums' in which we conduct researches on future digital-based museums.