Digitization and Visualization of Folk Dances in Cultural Heritage: A Review

According to UNESCO, cultural heritage does not only include monuments and collections of objects, but also contains traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed to our descendants. Folk dances represent part of cultural heritage and their preservation for the next generations appears of major importance. Digitization and visualization of folk dances form an increasingly active research area in computer science. In parallel to the rapidly advancing technologies, new ways for learning folk dances are explored, making the digitization and visualization of assorted folk dances for learning purposes using different equipment possible. Along with challenges and limitations, solutions that can assist the learning process and provide the user with meaningful feedback are proposed. In this paper, an overview of the techniques used for the recording of dance moves is presented. The different ways of visualization and giving the feedback to the user are reviewed as well as ways of performance evaluation. This paper reviews advances in digitization and visualization of folk dances from 2000 to 2018.