Performance Animation from Low-dimensional Control Signals
| Jinxiang Chai | Jessica K. Hodgins |
ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH 2005 (2005)
The ability to accurately reconstruct a user's motion in real time would allow the intuitive control of characters in computer games, the control of avatars for virtual reality or electronically mediated communication, and the rapid prototyping of character animations. This project introduces an approach to performance animation that employs video cameras and a small set of retro-reflective markers to create a low-cost, easy-to-use system that might someday be practical for home use. The low-dimensional control signals from the user's performance are supplemented by a database of pre-recorded human motion. At run time, the system automatically learns a series of local models from a set of motion capture examples that are a close match to the marker locations captured by the cameras. These local models are then used to reconstruct the motion of the user as a full-body animation. We demonstrate the power and flexibility of this approach by having users control six behaviors in real time without significant latency: walking, running, hopping, jumping, boxing, and Kendo (Japanese sword art). The reconstructed motion is based on a single large human motion database. Our experiments indicate that this approach scales well with the size and heterogeneity of the database and is robust to variations in kinematics between users. The resulting animation also captures the individual style of the user's motion through spatial-temporal interpolation of the data. Finally, we assess the quality of the reconstructed motion by comparing against ground truth data simultaneously captured with a full marker set in a commercial motion capture system.
Jinxiang Chai, Jessica K. Hodgins (2005). Performance Animation from Low-dimensional Control Signals. ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH 2005, 24(3).
@article{Chai:2005:Performance,
author = "Jinxiang Chai and Jessica K. Hodgins",
title = "Performance Animation from Low-dimensional Control Signals",
year = "2005",
month = aug,
journal = "ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH 2005",
volume = "24",
number = "3",
}
