Dance Any Beat: Blending Beats with Visuals in Dance Video Generation

Generating dance from music is crucial for advancing automated choreography. Current methods typically produce skeleton keypoint sequences instead of dance videos and lack the capability to make specific individuals dance, which reduces their real-world applicability. These methods also require precise keypoint annotations, complicating data collection and limiting the use of self-collected video datasets. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel task: generating dance videos directly from images of individuals guided by music. This task enables the dance generation of specific individuals without requiring keypoint annotations, making it more versatile and applicable to various situations. Our solution, the Dance Any Beat Diffusion model (DabFusion), utilizes a reference image and a music piece to generate dance videos featuring various dance types and choreographies. The music is analyzed by our specially designed music encoder, which identifies essential features including dance style, movement, and rhythm. DabFusion excels in generating dance videos not only for individuals in the training dataset but also for any previously unseen person. This versatility stems from its approach of generating latent optical flow, which contains all necessary motion information to animate any person in the image. We evaluate DabFusion's performance using the AIST++ dataset, focusing on video quality, audio-video synchronization, and motion-music alignment. We propose a 2D Motion-Music Alignment Score (2D-MM Align), which builds on the Beat Alignment Score to more effectively evaluate motion-music alignment for this new task. Experiments show that our DabFusion establishes a solid baseline for this innovative task. Video results can be found on our project page: https://DabFusion.github.io.