A motion capture library for the study of identity, gender, and emotion perception from biological motion

Abstract

We present the methods that were used in capturing a library of human movements for use in computeranimated displays of human movement. The library is an attempt to systematically tap into and represent the wide range of personal properties, such as identity, gender, and emotion, that are available in a person's movements. The movements from a total of 30 nonprofessional actors (15 of them female) were captured while they performed walking, knocking, lifting, and throwing actions, as well as their combination in angry, happy, neutral, and sad affective styles. From the raw motion capture data, a library of 4,080 movements was obtained, using techniques based on Character Studio (plug-ins for 3D Studio MAX, AutoDesk, Inc.), MATLAB (The MathWorks, Inc.), or a combination of these two. For the knocking, lifting, and throwing actions, 10 repetitions of the simple action unit were obtained for each affect, and for the other actions, two longer movement recordings were obtained for each affect. We discuss the potential use of the library for computational and behavioral analyses of movement variability, of human character animation, and of how gender, emotion, and identity are encoded and decoded from human movement.

Inferring intentions from biological motion: A stimulus set of point-light communicative interactions

“…Following Dekeyser, Verfaillie, and Vanrie (2002), stimuli were constructed combining motion capture techniques and animation software. Although other point-light databases including a variety of human actions are available (e.g., Ma, Paterson, & Pollick, 2006;Shipley & Brumberg, 2005;Vanrie & Verfaillie, 2004), none of them contains communication acts.…”

The human motion database: A cognitive and parametric sampling of human motion

“…shown the motion data without giving any background about the subject that was captured, can identify features such as gender and emotion [11]. We can also observe a distinct change in the performance of the same action over the skeletal structure of the subject.…”

“…The Biological Motion library [11] has been built by the University of Glasgow, Scotland in order to analyze and identify motion properties or features such as gender, identity, and affects in the form of emotions (e.g., angry, sad, happy, neutral) in a motion. The Biological Motion Library was inspired by a lack of data to study the perception of human motion.…”

“…Motion capture databases have been constructed to serve as input for various research problems including gesture recognition [10], identification of motion properties [11], motion blending and synthesizing [12], pose estimation and tracking [14], interactive communication [5].…”

Aprendizagem motora baseada em demonstrações de movimento biológico

“…animações de pontos de luz e manipular muitas variáveis de interesse (e.g., MA; PATERSON; POLLICK, 2006;VANRIE;VERFAILLIE, 2004).…”