Similarity-Based Processing of Motion Capture Data

Motion capture technologies digitize human movements by tracking 3D positions of specific skeleton joints in time. Such spatio-temporal data have an enormous application potential in many fields, ranging from computer animation, through security and sports to medicine, but their computerized processing is a difficult problem. The recorded data can be imprecise, voluminous, and the same movement action can be performed by various subjects in a number of alternatives that can vary in speed, timing or a position in space. This requires employing completely different data-processing paradigms compared to the traditional domains such as attributes, text or images. The objective of this tutorial is to explain fundamental principles and technologies designed for similarity comparison, searching, subsequence matching, classification and action detection in the motion capture data. Specifically, we emphasize the importance of similarity needed to express the degree of accordance between pairs of motion sequences and also discuss the machine-learning approaches able to automatically acquire content-descriptive movement features. We explain how the concept of similarity together with the learned features can be employed for searching similar occurrences of interested actions within a long motion sequence. Assuming a user-provided categorization of example motions, we discuss techniques able to recognize types of specific movement actions and detect such kinds of actions within continuous motion sequences. Selected operations will be demonstrated by on-line web applications

Human Motion Retrieval Using Video or Drawn Sketch

The importance of motion retrieval is increasing now a days. The majority of existing motion retrieval labor intensive, there has been a recent paradigm move in the animation industry with an increasing use of pre-recorded movement of animating exclusive figures. An essential need to use motion catch data is an efficient method for listing and accessing movements. I n this work, a novel sketching interface for interpreting the problem is provided. This simple strategy allows the user to determine the necessary movement by drawing several movement swings over a attracted personality, which needs less effort and extends the users expressiveness. To support the real-time interface, a specific development of the movements and the hand-drawn question is needed. Here we are implementing the Conjugate Gradient method for retrieving motion from hand drawn sketch and video. It is an optimization and prominent iterative method. It is fast and uses a small amount of storage

DanceMoves: A Visual Analytics Tool for Dance Movement Analysis

Analyzing body movement as a means of expression is of interest in diverse areas, such as dance, sports, films, as well as anthropology or archaeology. In particular, in choreography, body movements are at the core of artistic expression. Dance moves are composed of spatial and temporal structures that are difficult to address without interactive visual data analysis tools. We present a visual analytics solution that allows the user to get an overview of, compare, and visually search dance move features in video archives. With the help of similarity measures, a user can compare dance moves and assess dance poses. We illustrate our approach through three use cases and an analysis of the performance of our similarity measures. The expert feedback and the experimental results show that 75% to 80% of dance moves can correctly be categorized. Domain experts recognize great potential in this standardized analysis. Comparative and motion analysis allows them to get detailed insights into temporal and spatial development of motion patterns and poses

A human motion feature based on semi-supervised learning of GMM

Using motion capture to create naturally looking motion sequences for virtual character animation has become a standard procedure in the games and visual effects industry. With the fast growth of motion data, the task of automatically annotating new motions is gaining an importance. In this paper, we present a novel statistic feature to represent each motion according to the pre-labeled categories of key-poses. A probabilistic model is trained with semi-supervised learning of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Each pose in a given motion could then be described by a feature vector of a series of probabilities by GMM. A motion feature descriptor is proposed based on the statistics of all pose features. The experimental results and comparison with existing work show that our method performs more accurately and efficiently in motion retrieval and annotation

Pose-Timeline for Propagating Motion Edits

Motion editing often requires repetitive operations for modifying similar action units to give a similar effector impression. This paper proposes a system for efficiently and flexibly editing the sequence of iterative actionsby a few intuitive operations. Our system visualizes a motion sequence on a summary timeline with editablepose-icons, and drag-and-drop operations on the timeline enable intuitive controls of temporal properties of themotion such as timing, duration, and coordination. This graphical interface is also suited to transfer kinematicaland temporal features between two motions through simple interactions with a quick preview of the resultingposes. Our method also integrates the concept of edit propagation by which the manual modification of one actionunit is automatically transferred to the other units that are robustly detected by similarity search technique. Wedemonstrate the efficiency of our pose-timeline interface with a propagation mechanism for the timing adjustmentof mutual actions and for motion synchronization with a music sequence

Exploring sparsity, self-similarity, and low rank approximation in action recognition, motion retrieval, and action spotting

This thesis consists of 4 major parts. In the first part (Chapters 1-2), we introduce the overview, motivation, and contribution of our works, and extensively survey the current literature for 6 related topics. In the second part (Chapters 3-7), we explore the concept of Self-Similarity in two challenging scenarios, namely, the Action Recognition and the Motion Retrieval. We build three-dimensional volume representations for both scenarios, and devise effective techniques that can produce compact representations encoding the internal dynamics of data. In the third part (Chapter 8), we explore the challenging action spotting problem, and propose a feature-independent unsupervised framework that is effective in spotting action under various real situations, even under heavily perturbed conditions. The final part (Chapters 9) is dedicated to conclusions and future works. For action recognition, we introduce a generic method that does not depend on one particular type of input feature vector. We make three main contributions: (i) We introduce the concept of Joint Self-Similarity Volume (Joint SSV) for modeling dynamical systems, and show that by using a new optimized rank-1 tensor approximation of Joint SSV one can obtain compact low-dimensional descriptors that very accurately preserve the dynamics of the original system, e.g. an action video sequence; (ii) The descriptor vectors derived from the optimized rank-1 approximation make it possible to recognize actions without explicitly aligning the action sequences of varying speed of execution or difference frame rates; (iii) The method is generic and can be applied using different low-level features such as silhouettes, histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), etc. Hence, it does not necessarily require explicit tracking of features in the space-time volume. Our experimental results on five public datasets demonstrate that our method produces very good results and outperforms many baseline methods. For action recognition for incomplete videos, we determine whether incomplete videos that are often discarded carry useful information for action recognition, and if so, how one can represent such mixed collection of video data (complete versus incomplete, and labeled versus unlabeled) in a unified manner. We propose a novel framework to handle incomplete videos in action classification, and make three main contributions: (i) We cast the action classification problem for a mixture of complete and incomplete data as a semi-supervised learning problem of labeled and unlabeled data. (ii) We introduce a two-step approach to convert the input mixed data into a uniform compact representation. (iii) Exhaustively scrutinizing 280 configurations, we experimentally show on our two created benchmarks that, even when the videos are extremely sparse and incomplete, it is still possible to recover useful information from them, and classify unknown actions by a graph based semi-supervised learning framework. For motion retrieval, we present a framework that allows for a flexible and an efficient retrieval of motion capture data in huge databases. The method first converts an action sequence into a self-similarity matrix (SSM), which is based on the notion of self-similarity. This conversion of the motion sequences into compact and low-rank subspace representations greatly reduces the spatiotemporal dimensionality of the sequences. The SSMs are then used to construct order-3 tensors, and we propose a low-rank decomposition scheme that allows for converting the motion sequence volumes into compact lower dimensional representations, without losing the nonlinear dynamics of the motion manifold. Thus, unlike existing linear dimensionality reduction methods that distort the motion manifold and lose very critical and discriminative components, the proposed method performs well, even when inter-class differences are small or intra-class differences are large. In addition, the method allows for an efficient retrieval and does not require the time-alignment of the motion sequences. We evaluate the performance of our retrieval framework on the CMU mocap dataset under two experimental settings, both demonstrating very good retrieval rates. For action spotting, our framework does not depend on any specific feature (e.g. HOG/HOF, STIP, silhouette, bag-of-words, etc.), and requires no human localization, segmentation, or framewise tracking. This is achieved by treating the problem holistically as that of extracting the internal dynamics of video cuboids by modeling them in their natural form as multilinear tensors. To extract their internal dynamics, we devised a novel Two-Phase Decomposition (TP-Decomp) of a tensor that generates very compact and discriminative representations that are robust to even heavily perturbed data. Technically, a Rank-based Tensor Core Pyramid (Rank-TCP) descriptor is generated by combining multiple tensor cores under multiple ranks, allowing to represent video cuboids in a hierarchical tensor pyramid. The problem then reduces to a template matching problem, which is solved efficiently by using two boosting strategies: (i) to reduce the search space, we filter the dense trajectory cloud extracted from the target video; (ii) to boost the matching speed, we perform matching in an iterative coarse-to-fine manner. Experiments on 5 benchmarks show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art under various challenging conditions. We also created a challenging dataset called Heavily Perturbed Video Arrays (HPVA) to validate the robustness of our framework under heavily perturbed situations