An explainable real time sensor graph transformer for dance recognition
Abstract
The automatic interpretation of dance motion sequences from inertial and pressure-based sensors requires models that maintain strict temporal fidelity, preserve orientation invariance, and produce verifiable reasoning suitable for real-time deployment on constrained hardware. Existing approaches frequently lose accuracy when confronted with heterogeneous choreography, variable sensor placement, or shifting performer-specific kinematics, and they offer limited access to the decision-relevant evidence that underlies their classifications. This study introduces an explainable sensor-driven dance recognition framework constructed around an Adaptive Sensor Normalisation module that performs quaternion-based orientation correction with drift-aware Kalman refinement, a Multi-Scale Motion Feature Extractor that applies tempo-conditioned dilation schedules to capture micro-step transitions and phrase-level rhythmic structures, and a Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Core that integrates edge-weighted graph convolutions with dual spatial-temporal attention to quantify sensor saliency and temporal concentration. A final Explainable Decision and Feedback Layer links prototype-anchored latent representations with gradient-resolved saliency vectors to expose class-specific motion determinants. The system is optimized for edge-class execution through kernel-level compression and causal attention windows operating on a 512-sample sliding segment. Experiments on three inertial datasets indicate classification accuracy up to 94.2 percent, movement-quality estimation of 92.8 percent, and sub-8.5 millisecond per-frame latency that confirms stability under tempo variation, sensor drift, and partial channel loss.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Human Motion and Animation
Human Pose and Action Recognition
Diversity and Impact of Dance
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Scientific Reports
- Publisher
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 4622–4622
- Publication date
- 14 January 2026
- Language
- EN