Traditional methods for motion comparison consider features from individual characters. However, the semantic meaning of many human activities is usually defined by the interaction between them, such as a high-five interaction of two characters. There is little success in adapting interaction-based features in activity comparison, as they either do not have a fixed topology or are in high dimensional. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for activity comparison from the interaction point of view. Our new metric evaluates the similarity of interaction by adapting the Earth Mover's Distance onto a customized geometric mesh structure that represents spatial-temporal interactions. This allows us to compare different classes of interactions and discover their intrinsic semantic similarity. We created five interaction databases of different natures, covering both twocharacters (synthetic and real-people) and character-object interactions, which are open for public uses. We demonstrate how the proposed metric aligns well with the semantic meaning of the interaction. We also apply the metric in interaction retrieval and show how it outperforms existing ones. The proposed method can be used for unsupervised activity detection in monitoring systems and activity retrieval in smart animation systems.

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Controlling a crowd using multi‐touch devices appeals to the computer games and animation industries, as such devices provide a high‐dimensional control signal that can effectively define the crowd formation and movement. However, existing works relying on pre‐defined control schemes require the users to learn a scheme that may not be intuitive. We propose a data‐driven gesture‐based crowd control system, in which the control scheme is learned from example gestures provided by different users. In particular, we build a database with pairwise samples of gestures and crowd motions. To effectively generalize the gesture style of different users, such as the use of different numbers of fingers, we propose a set of gesture features for representing a set of hand gesture trajectories. Similarly, to represent crowd motion trajectories of different numbers of characters over time, we propose a set of crowd motion features that are extracted from a Gaussian mixture model. Given a run‐time gesture, our system extracts the K nearest gestures from the database and interpolates the corresponding crowd motions in order to generate the run‐time control. Our system is accurate and efficient, making it suitable for real‐time applications such as real‐time strategy games and interactive animation controls.

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