Segmenting motion capture data using a qualitative analysis

Abstract

Many interactive 3D games utilize motion capture for both character animation and user input. These applications require short, meaningful sequences of data. Manually producing these segments of motion capture data is a laborious, time-consuming process that is impractical for real-time applications. We present a method to automatically produce semantic segmentations of general motion capture data by examining the qualitative properties that are intrinsic to all motions, using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). LMA provides a good compromise between high-level semantic features, which are difficult to extract for general motions, and low-level kinematic features, which often yield unsophisticated segmentations. Our method finds motion sequences which exhibit high output similarity from a collection of neural networks trained with temporal variance. We show that segmentations produced using LMA features are more similar to manual segmentations, both at the frame and the segment level, than several other automatic segmentation methods.